In order to understand what value Antonio Negri’s Pipeline has today, the reader needs to understand the significance of the book’s original appearance, its place in his critical development. This book was first published in Italy by Giulio Einaudi in 1983, under the title PipeLine: Lettere da Rebibbia (Pipeline: Letters from Rebibbia). Rebibbia will be explained shortly, but first things first: why ‘Pipeline’? The term appears several times in the text, perhaps most notably in the concluding lines of the fourth letter: ‘There is energy in what I am expressing. But is my writing up to it? Energy – flow – a gas pipeline – an oil pipeline – a pipeline – it is moving forward, but it’s filthy’ (Letter Four, p. 54). But Pipeline is more than an industrial or hydrodynamic metaphor, as the opening lines of the twentieth letter reveal: ‘These conversations that I’m having with myself are elemental, even in the strong sense – rather than having the fragmented rhythm of philosophy, they are more like music in their flowingness. Pipeline’ (Letter Twenty, p. 213). This emergent complexity is no more than what Negri had promised in the second paragraph of the first letter: ‘A real flow. Pipeline’ (Letter One, p. 14). Negri intends his letters to act as a conduit, then, not only between himself and his reader but between individual and collective, between autobiography and art, between philosophy and militancy, between past and future, and between Italy and the world.
Today Negri is well known around the world as a provocative theorist of capitalist globalisation and of the novel forms of resistance that the phenomenon has inspired. His books written in collaboration with Michael Hardt – Empire, Multitude, Commonwealth and Declaration – have been translated into dozens of languages and their concepts and strategies have been taken up, both for prolonged debate and for immediate use, by subversive movements in many nations. At the time these letters were written, in the early eighties, Negri was already prominent and controversial in Italy for his organising activities in workplaces and as a radical political theorist to the left of both the Communist and the Socialist Party. As he explains at the start of the sixth letter, he became actively involved in Italian left politics upon completing his formal education at home and abroad in 1959. As a professor of the philosophy of law at the University of Padua’s Institute for Political Science, he was uniquely well situated to construct links between the students, who became increasingly politically active as the sixties progressed, and the industrial workers of the Veneto, who were losing patience with their political representatives in the left-wing parties. By working with his colleagues to create situations in which those groups could come together, Negri helped to cross-pollinate a counterculture that would be unmatched by any other for size, inventiveness and dedication to practical militancy. These letters tell the story of that counterculture as much as they tell Negri’s own story.
Along with colleagues from the university and comrades from the factories, Negri co-founded the radical group Workers’ Power (Potere Operaio, Potop) in 1969, in the hope of consolidating the many local victories that workers were winning throughout Italy despite opposition from their own unions and from the left parties that claimed to speak for them. Potop openly organised wildcat strikes, work slowdowns, occupations and workers’ seminars in defiance of the unions. At the dawn of the seventies, the Italian radical movements diversified as feminists, unemployed, gays and lesbians, and other subjects ignored by the existing political party structure began to make demands as aggressive as those of the students and factory workers. Their challenges to the exclusionary composition of Workers’ Power led Negri and his comrades to dissolve the group and begin constituting a more open-ended organisation, or rather a network of organisations, which came to be called Workers’ Autonomy (Autonomia Operaia). In most western nations the radical rupture of ‘politics as usual’ that defined 1968 was soon absorbed back into conventional political structures; but in Italy it persisted for another decade, taking on increasingly dramatic and outrageous forms that ranged from the wildly theatrical Metropolitan Indians to the underground cells of the Red Brigades and Armed Proletarian Nuclei. At the height of the movements in 1977–8, millions of Italians of all ages were involved to some degree in organised dissent, and the state was increasingly unable to preserve the kind of order required for capitalist management of the economy. It was a pivotal time of widespread social instability, when small events could have gigantic ramifications. At that moment the Red Brigades kidnapped former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro and, after holding him for weeks and subjecting him to a ‘people’s trial’ for the crime of trying to build an alliance between the centre-right Christian Democratic Party and the Italian Communist Party, murdered him. Their overall aim was to shatter the Italian state’s legitimacy and cause it to collapse, whereupon some version of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ could take charge.1 Unsurprisingly, this did not happen; on the contrary, Moro’s murder heightened public fears of the more chaotic aspects of the radical movements and gave the state the support it needed to finally strike back at them. One of the first such strikes was launched against Negri on 7 April 1979, when he and a number of his colleagues were arrested on charges of involvement in Moro’s kidnapping and murder and of ‘armed insurrection against the powers of the state’ (see Letter Nineteen, p. 204).
Pipeline was written while Negri was incarcerated in Rebibbia Prison, a penal complex consisting of three separate men’s facilities and one women’s facility, which was built in the northeast quarter of Rome in 1972. Negri was held there for several years pending trial, originally on the Moro and armed insurrection charges; by the time this book was written, however, the Moro charges had been dropped and replaced by a continually mutating set of accusations involving terrorism. The sole purpose of these accusations was to allow the Italian state to lock him up for as long as possible before trial. In addition to the crimes listed above, Negri was accused of being the mastermind behind not only Workers’ Power but also the clandestine terrorist organisation of the Red Brigades, with which he had never been involved and which he had regularly criticised and denounced in his writings and speeches over many years. As a result of the many warrants issued in other jurisdictions following his original arrest, he had been held at other prisons too before being brought to Rebibbia: Rovigo (outside Padua), Fossombrone (east of Florence), Palmi (northeast of Messina at the southern tip of Italy) and Trani (on the Adriatic coast in Puglia). Negri describes the different atmospheres of those prisons in the opening paragraphs of the nineteenth letter (p. 204). By mid-1981 his transfers from prison to prison had come to an end and he remained in Rome, incarcerated under terrorism and armed insurrection charges until his release from prison in late June 1983. The release came as a result of his election to the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house in the Italian parliament.
Although Pipeline was published in February 1983, the letters that comprise it were composed between 10 October 1981 and 7 April 1982, during Negri’s third year in custody, as he awaited trial. In his first year of imprisonment he had managed to write his influential study of Spinoza, The Savage Anomaly, despite the constant interruptions of interrogations, preliminary court hearings, meetings with legal counsel, and transfers from one high-security prison to another; indeed at the conclusion to that book’s preface he insists: ‘I do not believe that prison has given a different quality, either better or worse’, to Savage Anomaly than freedom had to his earlier works. He concludes the preface with the hope that ‘the solitude of this damned cell has proved as fertile as the Spinozan solitude of the optical laboratory’, and signs it ‘From the prisons of Rovigo, Rebibbia, Fossombrone, Palmi and Trani: April 7, 1979 to April 7, 1980’.2 Part of the reason why Negri was able to write not only The Savage Anomaly but also many other, shorter texts while imprisoned was the fact that, although confined, he was not wholly isolated in prison. 7 April 1979 marks not only the date of Negri’s arrest but also the start of a vast effort on the part of the Italian state to criminalise the radical movements, including Workers’ Power and Workers’ Autonomy, that had been convulsing the country’s political landscape since the late sixties. This effort began with the arrest of thousands of militants in all parts of Italy – many of whom, like Negri, would be tried collectively only after many lengthy postponements. In a late 1980 interview Negri admitted:
My life in prison isn’t bad. There are about 3,000 comrades currently held in the Special Prisons (for ‘terrorists’). There is therefore a very rich level of political discussion. Our strength, even in prison, is indubitable. So, our conditions of imprisonment are not of the worst. They are without doubt better than those that the common prisoner had to undergo before the influx of comrades into the prisons.3
Conditions in the prisons would soon become worse. During Negri’s second year of incarceration, 1980 to 1981, he continued to write prolifically, as the many essays that make up his 1982 book Macchina tempo: Rompicapi, liberazione, costituzione (Time Machine: New Problems, Liberation, Constitution) demonstrate.4 The strength of the radical comrades within the Italian prison system undergirded his ongoing work, but that strength also led to confrontations with and retribution from the prison authorities. Not long after the interview cited above, Negri and his colleagues got caught up in a prison revolt led by Red Brigades prisoners who were being held in the same unit of Trani Prison. On 28 December 1980, the Red Brigaders took a guard prisoner after wounding him with an improvised knife, and used his keys to release other prisoners and then take other guards hostage. At sunset the next day, while negotiations between the Red Brigaders and the prison governor were breaking down, a military assault squad descended upon Trani in helicopters. Gunfire and grenade explosions announced their entrance. In their rush to retake the prison building, the soldiers made no distinctions between the Red Brigade prisoners, who were the instigators and the only active participants in the revolt, and the other prisoners, like Negri and his Padua colleague Emilio Vesce, who were nonparticipant bystanders. Vesce had two ribs broken and Negri was kicked in the head before both were driven by the soldiers into the arms of a platoon of masked prison guards, who beat them further. Once the prison building had been secured by the military, the guards systematically destroyed the prisoners’ belongings, including their personal letters and defence documents. Negri writes briefly about this revolt in Letter Nineteen (p. 208), but a more detailed account of the event is given in Revolution Retrieved.5
By the middle of his third year of imprisonment, when Negri began to write Pipeline, his earlier confidence in the strength of the militant movements and in their ultimate victory over the state’s forces had begun to weaken as a result of the endless changes in the charges against him, concomitant deferrals of his trial, and ongoing torments and indignities of prison life. (See the opening lines of Letter Ten, p. 107) As he notes in Letter Eighteen, by kidnapping, ‘prosecuting’ and then murdering Moro, the Red Brigades had not really attacked the Italian state, as they claimed; on the contrary, they had strengthened the state – in that Moro’s murder served as a pretext for the state’s criminalisation and suppression of the militant movements that it viewed as the greatest threat to its stability. This should come as no surprise, since the hierarchical structure and vanguardist ideology of the Red Brigades constituted a mirror image of the state’s administrative form and legal logic. So did the sham trial to which the Red Brigades subjected Moro before killing him. The proof of this gift that the Red Brigades gave to the state lay not only in the mass arrests of 7 April 1979 and in the brutal treatment of political prisoners, but also in the passage of legislation extending the maximum period of preventive detention prior to trial from six to eleven years in cases of alleged terrorism and granting leniency to ‘repentant’ terrorists (the pentiti) who implicated others in terrorist acts. By mid-1981, after even more comrades were crammed into the special prisons, Negri knew that he might be facing up to nine more years of incarceration before his trial began; and a deluge of new charges was brought against him on the basis of the claims of pentiti anxious to reduce their own sentences.6 In writing his letters against this backdrop, Negri was trying to set the power of militant desire, both his own and that of his comrades, flowing again, so as to build a pipeline that could serve at least as an affective and conceptual – if not physical or legal – line of flight from the prison’s and the state’s rigid walls, which had closed around all of them.
The letters themselves may seem confusing or even offputting to readers who expect either a concerted legalistic self-defence, complete with exculpatory evidence, or a glimpse of the everyday life of a notorious ‘wicked teacher’ (in Italian cattivo maestro, as Negri and his fellow militant professors were labelled in the Italian press – see his tribute to Raniero Panzieri in Letter Seven). Although he writes movingly of his childhood (Letters One and Two), first love (Letter Three), his wife and children (Letters Six and Ten), his mother’s death (Letter Eleven), and his arrest and revulsion at prison life (Letter Nineteen), his main purpose is not to chronicle the details of his individual experience. The letters do not constitute an autobiography or memoir, at least not a full one. At most they offer a narrative of those experiences, whether intellectual or somatic, individual or collective, that made Negri into the militant theorist he was at that moment. This book is really an attempt at a philosophical definition and defence of militant practice, both his own and that of the radical movements more broadly. It is also an implicit political self-criticism, in the tradition of Georg Lukács’ Defence of History and Class Consciousness.7 As Negri puts it at the start of the first letter, ‘Tell me your name, claim what you are’ (Letter One, p. 13). His method here is not so different from the ‘biographical materialism’ that he deployed in his studies of Descartes and Spinoza, though the tone of this book is quite different from the tone of those earlier ones.8 In the postscript to Letter Fifteen, he acknowledges that
what I’m writing is unnecessarily convoluted. Or maybe convoluted is not the right word: overloaded, rather, with content added to the basic theme – baroque, because it seems that I can’t avoid alternatives, variants and derivations. Bombastic. This redundancy conceals, it does not clarify. Please forgive this limitation of mine – and also its complement, which is that sometimes I am clumsy, irritated, inattentive, late, dreamy, writing in shorthand – and this happens each time that some involuntary memory pushes itself forward in me and brings to the surface that other aspect of life that is my ego, my history, my private things, my memories, my loves, and all that. (Letter Fifteen, pp. 171–2)
The book’s distance from conventional autobiography or memoir becomes even clearer when we examine the author’s note that immediately precedes the first letter. In that note, Negri insists upon the accuracy of the site and dates of the letters’ composition and the actuality of its references to literature, political events and events of everyday life, but he also tells the reader frankly that the book’s genre is imaginative rather than historical. What does he mean by this? First and foremost, he is alerting the reader to the fact that his addressee throughout the book, the young French philosopher and militant David, is a fiction or, more precisely, a composite of the many comrades with whom Negri worked, intimately and passionately, to construct a viable radical political organisation over the course of the sixties and seventies.9 From this fact it follows that the letter form Negri adopts is also part of the fiction, in the sense that these letters were never really sent to anyone – as for example Antonio Gramsci’s and later George Jackson’s prison letters were – but instead are addressed to the book’s general readers, over David’s head as it were.10 The regular recurrence of references to the book’s title further confirms this. Thus, while Negri is implicitly and self-consciously referring to the tradition of earlier prison letters, particularly those of incarcerated radicals like Gramsci and Jackson, his book adopts the documentary mode of that tradition as a formal device that allows him to address an unknown, potentially international readership in familiar terms.
In the self-conscious fictional artifice of this book, as in its unique mixture of artistic, philosophical and political references, we can see one of the earliest substantive flowerings of Negri’s own aesthetic impulse, which has recently given rise to his series of stage dramas, the Trilogy of Resistance11 (to be followed by a Trilogy of Critique and a Trilogy of Love). Negri’s pantheon has always included James Joyce, Bertolt Brecht, Giacomo Leopardi and other poets, playwrights and novelists – along with philosophers like Spinoza and militant thinkers like Machiavelli, Marx and Lenin, all of whom influence his craft in Pipeline (see especially Letters Ten and Fifteen). Even science fiction, in the form of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books, provides Negri with both inspiration and consolation (in Letter Seventeen). This aesthetic impulse will later lead him in surprising directions, some of which are first signalled in these letters. For example, at the beginning of Letter Eighteen Negri pens a tribute, couched in explicitly literary terms, to the man he was accused of murdering:
He, Moro, with incredible skill and an intelligence born of despair, strove to make the whole story even more far-reaching and enriched it with true substance, through his letters during the two months of his captivity. The disclosure of a politician’s humanity, as we know, is a topos of classical tragedy. The pity elicited could be profound. (Letter Eighteen, p. 194)
The first play of Negri’s Trilogy of Critique, still in progress, endeavours to stage Moro’s ‘classical tragedy’, but also to go beyond it in order to honour the prime minister’s daring candour; its title is L’uomo che ride: Critica della politica (The Laughing Man: Critique of Politics).12
Pipeline is the only one of Negri’s more than sixty books to be published by Giulio Einaudi Editore of Turin, which at that time was perhaps the most prestigious publishing house in Italy. Einaudi had published the first edition of Antonio Gramsci’s Letters from Prison in 1947, and went on to become a major left-leaning publisher while remaining independent of both the Italian Communist Party and the Italian Socialist Party.13 Many of the best-known and best-loved names in postwar Italian literature were published by Einaudi, for example Cesare Pavese, Italo Calvino and Giorgio Agamben. According to the back cover of the original edition, Giulio Einaudi himself invited Negri to write Pipeline because he felt that Negri’s story amounted to a ‘central testimony of our time’.14 It is difficult to overstate the significance of this gesture of Einaudi’s at that moment in Negri’s judicial predicament – a moment when Negri and his co-defendants had been thoroughly demonised in the eyes of the Italian public as a result of the mainstream media’s shamefully uncritical parroting of prosecution claims (even the Communist Party-controlled paper L’Unità endorsed those claims). The fledgling independent left media, such as the newspaper Il Manifesto, and the more specialised journals of the academic left had consistently been more supportive of Negri and his comrades, though sometimes only on the basis of their commitment to civil liberties and due process; but their influence was comparatively small. Against this backdrop, Einaudi’s invitation can only have been understood as a gesture of solidarity, since Negri’s writings had never been bestsellers and Pipeline itself is too unusual and demanding in style to appeal to a broad popular audience. Given all this, the publication of Pipeline inaugurated a period, corresponding to the fourth year of Negri’s incarceration, in which prominent figures in Italian cultural life who were not involved with the militant movements expressed public support for the demonised prisoners. For Negri, ultimately the most important (though not unproblematic) of these figures would be Marco Panella, the leader of the small but inventive Radical Party, which would nominate Negri for a seat in the Italian parliament in the 1983 elections. Negri’s election as a deputy for Rome, Milan and Naples forced the state to release him from prison and later allowed him to flee to France when parliament voted to strip him of his immunity from prosecution.15 Soon thereafter he was found guilty of the freshest charges against him and sentenced to 30 years of imprisonment; but the French government, which interpreted his prosecution as political, refused to extradite him in response to Italian requests. He remained in exile for 14 years, during which a series of appeals reduced his sentence to 13 years, before returning to Italy in 1997 to serve out his sentence. All told, Negri served six and a half years of full-time detention plus another three years of half-time house arrest before being released on parole in 2003.
The letters that make up this book are important as a participant’s account of how the radical social movements of the sixties and seventies emerged, fragmented and were ultimately destroyed in Italy, as well as of how the movements’ innovations in theory and practice survived that defeat to influence struggle in the new millennium. Hence their significance is largely retrospective. However, they also have a prospective relevance, although it is much less readily apparent than their historical value. The letters occupy a key position in the evolution of Negri’s later work, which proved so influential, on collective resistance to the new paradigm of capitalist power – that is, on the multitude against Empire. Many of the observations, proposals and themes in these letters constitute the embryos from which later analyses and concepts would grow. The first letter evokes the poor as the fundamental category of future resistance – ‘The poor is the sign of the collective’ (Letter One,p. 23) – just as Hardt and Negri would in Multitude,16 and the third letter links that collective subject to the project of a materialist utopia, defined as ‘the collective desire to go beyond the limit set up by enemies in order to guarantee of their power’ (Letter Three, p.42). The thirteenth and fourteenth letters acknowledge the increasing significance of feminist thought and struggle for Negri’s conception of a subversive subjectivity, which would ultimately lead to the definition of affective, immaterial or cyborg labour in Hardt and Negri’s Labor of Dionysus17 and to the emphasis on the ‘living flesh’ of the multitude in their Multitude.18 Moreover, Negri’s prison experience as a whole made his and Hardt’s extension of Michel Foucault’s analysis of the expanding ‘carceral’ dimension of contemporary biopolitics, as well as their adoption of Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the society of control, frighteningly concrete.19 To put it bluntly, the techniques pioneered by the Italian legislature, judiciary and prison system to suppress the radical movements of the sixties and seventies – techniques that were first tested on Negri and his comrades – are among the clearest and most direct sources for the generalised state of exception from the rule of law that defines Empire’s global rule today.
Despite this firsthand experience with the new forms of repression that now make militancy so risky, Negri’s ultimate assessment of his prison experience is affirmative, indeed hopeful. As he writes near the end of the nineteenth letter:
I was living in prison the first concrete dimensions of a long-term project, the realisation of the new dislocation of proletarian composition. A major effort that nevertheless enabled us, within the continuing struggle, to be participants again, but now transformed, in the resumption of the movement. (Letter Nineteen, p. 211)
And the very last words of the book take this notion a step further: ‘We are in the future – our present reflects some features of that future . . . The future has a relationship of reciprocity with the past – but it is ontologically prior to the past, even though in logical terms it comes after’ (Letter Twenty, pp. 221–2). In other words, the future already exists in the past and in the present, in the form of real tendencies that, although minor and difficult to discern, will grow and intensify to the point where they transform the world. Such was the destiny facing industrial labour in the eighteenth century, colonial emancipation in the nineteenth century, and self-organising social and technical systems in the mid-twentieth century. The art of subversive politics lies in recognising and nurturing those tendencies until they mature, in affirming their difference and all the unanticipated differences to which they will give rise in the fullness of time. This is what Negri describes – but also enacts – in Pipeline: the affirmation of difference, both individual and collective, as the active constitution of new political subjects, and ultimately the invention of a new, fluid social order that will not divide, reduce and conquer the inclusive diversity of the multitude but rather extend and intensify it. This is the future toward which Negri’s pipeline carries us.