Rebibbia, 15 February 1982
Cher David,
Often one has the impression that an artist, and even more so a philosopher, lives in his own time by chance . . . with their appearance, and at their appearance, nature, which does not leap, makes its only leap, which is a leap of joy, because it feels that it has finally reached its goal, in other words there where it forgets that it has a goal and has been in too strong a game of life and of becoming.
Thus Nietzsche, as cited by Deleuze.1 In truth, this ‘chance’, this ‘leap of joy’ when a genetic transition has been made, is less true in the case of the artist and the philosopher than in the case of the relationship between subjects and historical development: a block defined by chance but which, transforming itself, meets its own desire. So that the determination becomes necessary and productive, after having been ephemeral and even casual – and the leap is that of being, which is, once again, newly and singularly determined. I use the term ‘dislocation’ to refer to this leap forward of the subject and of nature, of nature and of history – of this block of being that does not deny relations but modifies and requalifies them. Das Diese nehmen [‘to grasp the This’] – which gathers and pulls them together. In the account I have given you of my life as a researcher and political agitator, I have already told you of other similar experiences – or, rather, of other similar events. We pluck ourselves out of indistinction and emotion, through practice and knowledge – until the world takes a leap forward. But every time – and always in different ways – the sense of the real is determined in such a physically intense manner, releasing within transformation and mobility a kind of frenzy of the new. Then it seems to me that you can be seized by the passion of admiration for the real that has been discovered, and you can be caught as by an ecstatic – or fanatical – drift within the emergence and within the figure of the dislocation. ‘Aesthetically, the miracle is that the world exists. That there is what there is’:2 as usual, the philosopher Wittgenstein sings individually what is a collective perception. It is no less true that there is a miracle – but it is collective. And it is collectively that one is constrained to the admiration of the miracle and overwhelmed by its effects. Here I shall tell you precisely about these movements of the spirit and of the real, which extend over time until the antagonistic subjectivity resumes its free initiative. (Because – let me suggest this in a parenthesis – thought and passion cannot end in admiration, as Nietzsche would have it. The Übermensch [superman] – Vattimo correctly reminds us – ‘cannot be understood as a conciliated subject, because it cannot be thought of as subject.’3 Instead, real thought and passion should be related – as our Spinoza teaches – to the liberating tendency of the collective subject, to ethics deployed.)
So here we are, right now, at the point where we have grasped on the one hand the capitalist passage of the crisis of value and on the other the new potentiality of the social proletariat: the relationship is negative, paralysing. The sphere of communication is tautological. A sort of drift internal to the emerged and magmatic relationship dominated us. They were certainly present, even pressing, the question whether the crisis state and the new historical bloc could be configured differently from how capital wanted, and thus also the question of the necessity of redefining the antagonistic relationship. But every time we tried to get a grip on an antagonistic determination we found ourselves reduced to describing it in a language that harked back to the old world or, if it innovated, it limited the innovation to an insignificant and powerless segment. The prison of ideology allowed only brief instances to come into the light. Infamous ideology. Admired weariness. Maybe it was better to rely on mystification and leave it at that. The historical block of the dislocation imposed itself as unity and circulation – the temptation of remaining within the peace of the dialectical correlation was devilishly enticing. In the Macondo forest you can fight to open a space for yourself or you can abandon yourself to the powerful tropical vapours: either way you cancel yourself in nature, whether you go or stay. No. It cannot be so. I do not want it. Infinite stimuli clash against the temptation. So we have to break with Macondo, with admiration – the tension of being enjoys the new only if it liberates the new . . . But how?
1973–1974: how hard it was, having to deal with these problems – and yet how firm was our conviction that we were now definitively in a new historical phase of the class struggle! The crisis had to be seen as a global and collective dislocation of values: this was the content of the admiration – the restlessness that stems from an awareness of the limits of that passion cannot prevent you from grasping the fullness of its importance. The highest level of the crisis was a new figure – and the most mature figure – of the struggle between the classes. Enough of the linear and dialectical view of the ‘development–crisis’ cycle. Just as in the 1960s we had understood the function of crisis against the tradition of overthrowing, now we had to understand, in its practical specificity, the leap of innovation – of capital and of class struggle – and we had to extract ourselves from that kind of resignation to the eternal return that third-internationalism in all its various guises imposed on us. Crisis and capitalist development, crisis and the raising and deepening of the class struggle: the more capital develops, the more class struggle becomes antagonistic and total.
At this point, David, you wanted to develop a new theory of value – do you remember? Developing admiration into a theoretical discovery, you said: the series of links that production reveals at this level of development, in its social dimension, can be summed up in a pattern of understanding that captures the flow of values, whatever their modified figure, and determines a social measure of them. The dissolution of value in command, the socialisation of the productive force, make it necessary to construct a theory of value as a theory of the administration of social production, as a reweaving of the metropolitan functions of production and of reproduction of value. No sooner said than done: it is an evil little genie, that objectivism, which sets to work here. And how many comrades there were who began to dig in the monetary field, in the administrative field, in the sciences of the territory – the attractions of systems theory and the prestige of the latest transformations in the thinking of the Frankfurt School were naturally very strong – even the teaching of French thinkers of the big reactionary schools was present.
But will it ever be possible, between Offe and Luhmann and Crozier, to reconquer and bite on the real? This new historical bloc, proposed in the narrow centripetal dynamic of its factors, described linearly – an equilibrium of fluids – does it not lead directly to the end of time, to pure ecstasy, to the postmodern and to the world rebuilt on Lyotard’s vain circus trapeze? ‘Rollerball.’ It seemed to me that the presupposition was lost in the unfolding – had we not perhaps taken as our starting point the equation ‘deepening of the antagonism – crisis – new capitalist order’, where the first term was the principal one – and where, therefore, what became fundamental was the reopening of antagonism against the new order? Conversely, by holding onto objectivistic hypotheses did we not risk a foolish defence of the new order? Prometheus was turning into Narcissus; but, for anyone unwilling to give in either to one or to the other, what was given? We know that the function of understanding is a prerequisite. However, we often acted like cats who, confusing the understanding of the causes with their actuality, preferred the cheese to the mouse that it reminded them of. We should take a better look around ourselves, I told you, David!
In fact we now had the opportunity for this. Never had it been more timely to take the decision to dissolve the 1968-ist political groups – large and small alike. In France and Germany the process took its own course. In Italy, by comparison to the others, we had the advantage of being ahead of the game. Now we were living the pleasure of rediscovering grassroots initiative, a rediscovery of the concrete. In this environment admiration is more difficult and complacency is impossible. The job is that of a weaver – follow the threads, twist them, tie them together with others, give them colour. Thank you, David, for the Velasquez print that you sent me – the Hilanderas del Prado. I have hung it in my cell, and it will last there until next time the guards do a search. I look at it and remember the objections – not so much humble as heuristically contrived, as functionally contrived, which I raised against the presumption of any theory of value. We were talking about welfare, about the new nomenclature of production and reproduction, about circulation and the dark pockets of ‘underground economy’, hypothesising that administration and state accounting might succeed in their control – if this happened, it would undoubtedly give a baseline to dig over and turn into a proposal for a new general theory of the value of social production. The Kapitalistate journal team, with O’Connor in the lead, was heading in the same direction in this period, working on the same theoretical hypothesis; vague echoes were reaching us. But the weaver objected that welfare was a mess – thousands and thousands of loose threads, incapable of being resolved into a logic. In this embroidery the ecstasy would have given way to the sword of Damocles. Was this not precisely the conclusion that was being reached by the more astute researchers into welfare? Frances Fox Piven in particular became our friend at this time: at bottom, even the weaver was a radical democrat, as the popular folk tradition attested. Hence welfare not as the basis of an orderly fabric of values, but as a tangle of powers and of needs, like a battlefield. Yet, whatever the objections, the attraction of the model was strong. But even stronger was the tension to demystify its autarchic design in its rigid form.
In 1973 an extraordinary struggle at FIAT broke the relative equilibrium and the social peace, relative to say the least, of that period of transition towards the composition of the social subject. A working-class struggle? Certainly – and a very violent one. Disguising their identities with the help of red kerchiefs, as the criminal courts put it, young workers marched through the factory departments, breaking up assembly lines, showering a hail of nuts and bolts, and neutralising the foremen. In short, they repeated, on an amplified scale, with great strength and en masse, what had always been done, since the late 1960s, in hot periods of contract negotiations. There was undoubtedly an extra element of organisation, precise and rhythmic timings, and an ability to act immediately: an organisational embryo and an invisible, diffuse network of initiatives. But this was not the key element. That was, on the one hand, the social solidarity that aggregated around the struggle – so that strikes had the possibility of going on for a very long time and an incredible level of class cooperation sustained materially the workers on strike. On the other hand – and this was the other key element – the internal marches soon turned into external squads that operated territorially in the community; they patrolled the streets around the Mirafiori and Rivalta plants and blockaded the roads, lighting up the night with the burning tyres of their nomadic style of struggle. The relationship with the workers outside of the factory was seen as central by working-class action in the factory. It was just a foretaste of what was to happen in the years to come: the more young people went into the factories – and the number of new employees in the following years would run into the tens of thousands – the more the factory struggle became social struggle. Turin like Kreuzberg. So that was the element that analysis had to identify – the social totality of working-class action, and thus the end of the specificity of the big factory as the exclusive place of conflict. Every discourse had now to be measured against the immediately social qualification of the ‘party of Mirafiori’. It was on this point that a theoretical initiative capable of lifting itself out of the indifference – however refined – of analysis could rebuild, not a totality to be admired, but an antagonistic social totality – which would be as great and articulated as the capitalist plan of command over social production. So we had to follow the lines, the trajectories through which the red kerchiefs were moving in society. And anyone who felt so inclined could have observed that these productive subjects could materially survive fifty and more days of strike action because each of them could make up for the gaps in the wage packet with a second job or with support from their families – in any case with ‘the inventiveness of everyday life’. The reserve army of the unemployed, into which the bosses could once toss you like a useless rag, no longer exerted its controlling function, except in absolutely weakened form. Following the threads of this social network, this everyday inventiveness, you uncovered an incredible network of diffuse production. But there was more: the workers were also participants in the structures of secondary and tertiary education that had been established in the preceding years. This was a workforce that had been sucked into an enormous process of acculturation, which now overflowed out of the factory, even if it subsequently returned there. Paradoxically, through the action of the red kerchiefs, something that was to be an essential characteristic of the coming years began to show itself: the encirclement of the factory by the proletariat. Induction – socialisation – working-class intellectuality, all of them diffuse: a new form of labour power.
But you will say, cher David, that in this case too we are in a theory of value. Because whether value and surplus value find in the factory their place of formation and extraction or they find it in the whole of society, understood and renewed as the overall seat of production – and hence whether the struggle on the segments of value into which the working day is divided happens in a single factory or in the factory-society – this has little effect on the overall unity of the picture. You’re right. But, as you know and as our discussion broadly showed, in this explosion of labour force in struggle there was something very different. There was, above all, a new way of understanding life, and this way went beyond the theory of value, no matter how conceived. Because the time and the form of the social reproduction of labour power, the quality of life, the acculturation, the inventivity of the everyday, the community dimensions, became – or rather began to impose themselves as – fundamental problems of the proletariat. Value theory was not capable of quantifying all this. (Later we would see many attempts to implant techniques of time budgeting, and talk about flexible working hours, and programme(s) of the sequence(s) of ‘working time – consumption – style of life – models of culture’. But the worker was by then a savage or a poacher with respect to time.) Thus the practice of liberation was no longer moving simply against the amount of surplus value, but against the quality of the exploitation. In the relationship that the young red kerchiefs had with society, they created a passage that was not just an underground tunnel to escape from the factory-prison – but also the negation of the specificity of the factory as the place of extraction of surplus value, of the determination of exploitation – and therefore as the privileged place of struggle. Factory workers have never seen the factory as an ontological place. They were driven there, amassed there, exploited there. They have never loved it – only ideology, fantastic and vulgar socialism, would claim this. Now, in the transmutation that was occurring, workers had the sense, in the game of exploitation and in the antagonistic apprenticeship of the struggle and of the absenteeism of those years, that their whole life, their whole time and space were involved. The whole of my life is in play. There are no spatial confines. There are no partitions of this totality. The new way of struggle thus had to represent the concrete specificity of the new subject. And theoretical admiration had to be broken – it had to find a logic of struggle on this new dimension.
Doretta and Ruggero were two workers from FIAT-Rivalta. During that period I often used to have discussions with them. They told me what was going on in the factory and during the struggles. The novelty of their behaviour resulted from the fact that, with adventurous confidence, they had built for themselves, with their own hands, a way of life so intelligent, sympathetic and supportive that rarely would you find a similar experience, even among the free-thinking and educated bourgeoisie. Ruggero was studying at university, Doretta was involved in a feminist group. They lived in a house not far from the factory, out in the country. The wine was good, they had good books on their shelves, the music was excellent, the flowers were always fresh: petunias, field poppies, not the eternal geraniums. What did proletarian violence mean for them? It was the effort to live – to live at a level of human dignity and a quality of life that their being factory workers denied them – but now, not so paradoxically, it actually imposed: for their way of living, intellectually and civically, was the quality of the new workforce. A dialectic of capitalist Zivilisation? Its contradiction was dynamic – but was it progressive and capable of being transcended? A mug, anyone who still believed in that. In effect, the time of capitalist life was hateful to Doretta and Ruggero. Children of proletarian parents, they had grown up in the appalling rhythms of the working day, which left no time for happiness. The cultural transformation that took place in them could find no expression other than rebellion. The time of liberation, construed as a possibility of happiness, was radically opposed to the capitalist working day. Of the latter time, each of us bore too many scars on his body. Life could – and had to – recompose itself in the social community against the alienation of the factory. I have to confess, cher David: although I have known many famous feminists, it was from Doretta that I understood for the first time what feminism was and its exceptional transformative importance in the composition of the proletariat. Because – as Doretta explained, with an eagerness that made her most beautiful among women – she and her comrades had understood that the factory took away everything from you and did not pay for reproduction and for love – it subjected these too. Or it paid for them through the family wage, very little or nothing, and always in a relationship of domination – the domination of the male and that of the boss. But the problem was that love could not be bought and sold, and she wanted it for herself, for what it meant: the production of life, an exuberance of passion, a richness. A basket of values completely the opposite of capitalist values was what arose directly from this feminism. Marcuse in his later years was in no doubt that postindustrial socialism would either be feminine or would not be at all. But Doretta was far more convincing than Marcuse, and she spoke of communism. Coming out of the factory with her workmates during the strikes, she found the dimensions of a free love and of a radical appropriation. In the struggle she realised her feminism – and she taught it to the liberated ‘gals’ who were with her on the demonstrations: the battle we are fighting, she would say, is for a restoration of humanity, of freedom, and of love. Working-class struggle is a step in the dance of liberation. A creative ‘happening’ – as E. P. Thompson put it. (And, once again – excuse me for repeating myself, David – my Spinoza comes to mind: ‘Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; we do not enjoy it because we restrain our lusts; on the contrary, because we enjoy it, we are able to restrain them.’4) In the relationship with society, by occupying the streets around Mirafiori, the red kerchiefs brought violence, yes, but – let us grasp the essential – they brought especially the consciousness of a new relationship with a world of alternative values that it was necessary to express – and also the fact that it was idiotic to ask the unions, the bosses or the factory to satisfy that. They moved through the world in leaps of joy – with admiration for what they recognised in themselves. But then admiration is not only a horizon to be demolished, a drift to avoid – perhaps, between Nietzsche and Deleuze, the leap of joy has pushed forward so far that determination can no longer be suffocated in admiration but can grasp its own totality, albeit transformed, and can practise it as innovation. The dislocation is of the subject, within the collective subject.
With Doretta and Roger and other comrades we played long games of cards during rest periods. The conversation ranged from welfare to wages. Between games of scopone and tresette we discussed the possibility of reading public spending in the same way we had become used to reading the wage packet. Jokingly we often referred to the entries in public spending under the headings of the wage packet, and we complicated the relative simplicity of the former to reduce it to the complexity of the second, and then vice versa. How much humour we injected into the abstractness of the mystifying norms of state and business accounting, and into multiplying the categories of administrative chaos and of the so-called values of the bosses: Lob des Polytheismus [In praise of polytheism]!5 The traditional sarcasm of the labour movement had become an irony of sophisticated ‘radicals’. Then, inevitably, as if following the incline of a slope, the discussion moved from there to the countless things in life that ought to be free – gratis. All the most beautiful things, all those things involved in the movement of desire. ‘Nor can a man any more live whose desires are at an end than he whose senses and imaginations are at a stand. Felicity is a continual progress of the desire from one object to another’, so said Hobbes, that man of the senses.6 In the capitalist world all the most beautiful things are monetised. Free of charge for the satisfaction of desire – this is how things should be. The beautiful is free of charge? But what does that mean? Doing it is not free of charge: only what you do is beautiful. At this point the polemic of poetics against aesthetics returned, with materialistic shades . . . Simple talk, teenage discourses . . . But the day after everything changed, because you felt and lived those things, and you rebuilt them in the initiative of struggle and in the protest marches. And that subject that had been so abstractly postulated, itself a product of dislocation, and which you had identified at the level of ideas, as an antagonist in the gigantic work of capitalist restructuring, now you saw it growing in concrete terms, en masse, and beautiful, before your eyes. FIAT – a university of proletarian class struggle. Yet again, the best was being taught here. In that continuity of tradition and innovation whose pungent odour only the great metaphysical dimension can offer. Thank you Doretta, thank you Ruggero. My old friend wrote: ‘no one knows how much the body is capable of . . .’ But here we do know. Here we have escaped the possible drift towards admiration and we have grasped it entirely as a potentiality of dislocation in the class struggle. You, too, David, you would soon no longer have doubts. Goodnight . . .