AGrammaroftheMultitude.doc

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The Italian edition was published from Rubbettino for Dottorato in Scienza Tecnologia e Società, Dipartimento di Sociologia e di Scienza Politica, Universita della Calabria, Italy
Special thanks for Giancarlo Ambrosino, Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea Casson for copy editing.
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A Grammar of the Multitude
For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life
by Paulo Virno
Foreword by Sylvère Lotringer

Translated from the Italian
Isabella Bertoletti
James Cascaito
Andrea Casson
SEMIOTEXT(E) FOREIGN AGENTS SERIES
Contents
· 1. FOREWORD: We, the Multitude
· 2. INTRODUCTION
o 2.1. People vs. Multitude: Hobbes and Spinoza
o 2.2. Exorcized plurality: the "private" and the "individual"
o 2.3. Three approaches to the Many
· 3. Forms of Dread and Refuge : Day One
o 3.1. Beyond the coupling of the terms fear/anguish
o 3.2. Common places and "general intellect"
o 3.3. Publicness without a public sphere
o 3.4. Which One for the Many?
· 4. Labor, Action, Intellect : Day Two
o 4.2. Juxtaposition of poiesis and praxis
o 4.3. On virtuosity. From Aristotle to Glenn Gould
o 4.4. The speaker as performing artist
o 4.5. Culture industry: anticipation and paradigm
o 4.6. Language on the stage
o 4.7. Virtuosity in the workplace
o 4.8. Intellect as score
o 4.9. Reason of State and Exit
· 5. Multitude as Subjectivity : Day Three
o 5.2. The principle of individuation
o 5.3. equivocal concept: bio-politics
o 5.4. The emotional tonalities of the multitude
o 5.5. Idle talk and curiosity
· 6. Ten Theses on the Multitude and Post-Fordist Capitalism Day Four
o 6.2. Thesis 1
o 6.3. Thesis 2
o 6.4. Thesis 3
o 6.5. Thesis 4
o 6.6. Thesis 5
o 6.7. Thesis 6
o 6.8. Thesis 7
o 6.9. Thesis 8
o 6.10. Thesis 9
o 6.11. Thesis 10
· 7. BIBLIOGRAPHY

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1. FOREWORD: We, the Multitude

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Paolo Virno's A Grammar of the Multitude is a short book, but it casts a very long shadow. Behind it looms the entire history of the labor movement and its heretical wing, Italian "workerism" (operaismo), which rethought Marxism in light of the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. For the most part, though, it looks forward. Abstract intelligence and immaterial signs have become the major productive force in the "post-Fordist" economy we are living in and they are deeply affecting contemporary structures and mentalities. Virno's essay examines the increased mobility and versatility of the new labor force whose work-time now virtually extends to their entire life. The "multitude" is the kind of subjective configuration that this radical change is liberating, raising the political question of what we are capable of.
Operaismo (workerism) has a paradoxical relation to traditional Marxism and to the official labor movement because it refuses to consider work as the defining factor of human life. Marxist analysis assumes that what makes work alienating is capitalist exploitation, but operaists realized that it is rather the reduction of life to work. Paradoxically, "workerists" are against work, against the socialist ethics that used to exalt its dignity. They don't want to re-appropriate work ("take over the means of production") but reduce it. Trade unions or parties are concerned about wages and working conditions. They don't fight to change the workers' lot, at best they make it more tolerable. Workerists pressed for the reduction of labor time and the transformation of production through the application of technical knowledge and socialized intelligence.
In the mid-30s the leftist philosopher Simone Weil experienced the appalling abjection of the assembly line first hand by enlisting in a factory. She wondered whether Lenin or Stalin could ever have set foot in a work
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place and celebrated workers' labor. "The problem is, therefore, quite clear," she concluded in Oppression and Liberty after renouncing Marxism and breaking up with the organized workers' movement. "It is a question of knowing whether it is possible to conceive of an organization of production" that wouldn't be "grinding down souls and bodies under oppression."1 It was too early to achieve this goal through automation and her efforts remained isolated. It finally took the Italian Operaists in the late 50s to pick up where she left off.
Ideologically, Operaism was made possible by the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956, which revealed the true nature of bureaucratic socialism. To young Italian intellectuals on the left of the left (among them Toni Negri and Mario Tronti) it became clear that the Soviet Union wasn't the Workers' Country, but a totalitarian form of capitalism. Around that time the first large emigration of Italian workers from the impoverished South to the industrial North proved even more unsettling. Instead of submitting to the new system of mass production, young unskilled workers ("mass-workers") bypassed established trade-unions, which privileged skilled workers, and furiously resisted the Ford assembly line. The Operaist movement took off in 1961 after the first massive labor confrontation in Turin. Quaderni Rossi ("Red Notebooks"), its first publication, analyzed the impact the young mass workers had on the labor force and the new "class composition" that emerged from recent capitalist transformations. Classe Operaia ("Working Class"), published in 1964, formulated a new political strategy, the refusal of work, challenging capital to develop its productive forces with new technology. This "strategy of refusal" (a seminal essay by Mario Tronti) was applied "inside" capitalist development, but "against it." It anticipated the post-68 analysis of capital by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze in Anti-Oedipus, 1972, and brought Italian social thinkers and post- Structuralist French philosophers together in the mid-70s. What mass-workers objected to most was the transfer of human knowledge to the machines, reducing life to "dead labor." There was an existential dimension there, but active and creative. Their effort to change labor conditions was unknown to classical Marxism, mostly preoccupied with mechanisms of oppression and their effect on the working class.
In Daybreak, Nietzsche summoned European workers to "declare that henceforth as a class they are a human impossibility and not just, as is customary, a harsh and purposeless establishment." And he exhorted that "impossible class" to swarm out from the European beehive, "and with this act of emigration in the grand manner protest against the machine, against capital, and against the choice with which they are now threatened, of
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becoming of necessity either slaves of the state or slaves of a revolutionary party..." This celebration of exile can be found in Michael Hardt and Toni Negri's Empire, a best-seller among American Marxist academics and art critics ("A specter haunts the world and it is the specter of migration...") as well as in Virno's A Grammar of the Multitude, which it complements in its own way. This call retroactively found its model in the unorthodox and mobile migrant labor force of the Wobblies (International Workers of the World) who organized immigrant workers throughout the United States in the 1920s. (Hence the paradoxical fondness of operaists for the American workers' movement and America in general). Migration as a form of resistance also recalls Marx's essay on modern colonization, laborers in Europe deserting famines or factory work for free lands in the American West.2 It took the inventiveness of Italian social thinkers to turn this cursory account of the workers' desire "to become independent landowners" into an anticipation of the postmodern multitude. While Hardt and Negri consider this kind of Exodus "a powerful form of class struggle," Virno cautions that desertion was "a transitory phase," an extended metaphor for the mobility of post-Fordist workers (European laborers worked in East Coast factories for a decade or two before moving on). A nuance, maybe, but significant. Unlike Hardt and Negri, Virno refrains from turning exile, or the multitude for that matter, let alone communism, into another splendid myth.
Autonomist theory is found in many places, including the United States, but the movement developed most powerfully in Italy where the 60s' movement extended well into the 70s. Breaking away from the orthodox and populist Marxism of Antonio Gramsci, founder of the Italian Communist Party, young Operaist intellectuals learned from the workers themselves what the reality of production was. They helped them create their organizations and confront the system of production head on through strikes and sabotage. This pragmatic and militant aspect of workerism sets Italian social thinkers apart. They opposed the hegemony of the Italian C.P. and Gramsci's strategy of small steps the "war of position" within civil society) which led to Eurocommunism and the "historic compromise" with the governing Christian-Democrats (conservatives). Operaists were the first to question the centrality of the proletariat, cornerstone of the entire socialist tradition, and call for a reevaluation of the categories of class analysis. The notion of "changing class composition" introduced by Sergio Bologna allowed them to re-center the revolutionary struggle on the "new social subject" just emerging at the time both from the factory and the university.3 The "Troubled Autumn" of 1969 was marked by the powerful offensive of mass-workers to obtain equality in salaries. Various workerist groups joined
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together to create a new organization, both a group and a magazine: Potere Operaio [Workers' Power]. It gathered a number of theorists like Mario Tronti, Tom Negri, Franco Piperno, Oreste Scalzone and Bologna. Their reformulation of Marxism became seminal for the entire autonomist movement. In 1974, the clandestine line of the Red Brigades clashed with the open forms of collective organization within Potere Operaio and led to the group's self-dissolution.
The workers' formidable pressure to control the cycle of production met with serious provocations from the secret services and the Christian-Democratic government, starting with the bombing of Piazza Fontana in Milan in 1969. Hastily attributed to the anarchists by the government, it justified an intense police repression of workers' organizations. This "strategy of tension" tore Italy apart and sent shock waves well into the 70s, verging on civil war. It triggered among factory workers in the Fiat factories the creation of underground terrorist groups — the "Red Brigades" and "Prima Linea" are the most well-known — targeting leaders of the industry and prominent political figures. The kidnapping of DC President Aldo Moro and his coldblooded execution by the Red Brigades after the government broke off the negotiations, further upset the political balance in Italy.
In 1975 Potere Operaio was replaced by Autonomia, a large movement involving students, women, young workers and the unemployed. Their rhizomatic organization embodied every form of political behavior — anti-hierarchical, anti-dialectical, anti-representative — anticipated by Operaist thinkers. Autonomia wasn't any kind of normal political organization. Libertarian, neo-anarchistic, ideologically open and loosely organized by regions, it was respectful of political differences. Autonomist groups only cooperated in common public actions. Experimental and imaginative, the mass movement was a far cry from the tight terrorist groups taking "armed struggle" into their hands. In 1977, an autonomist student was murdered by the fascists in Rome and Autonomia exploded into the "Movement of 1977."4 It swept the entire country, taking over the universities in Rome, Palermo and Naples, then in Florence, Turin and Finally Bologna. It seemed as if they were about to take over Italy. What they would have done with it, Piperno recognized recently, they didn't really know. It was an inauspicious time for the movement to come of age. Challenged from its far left, the Communist Party used Moro's murder to eliminate Autonomia. Accused of being a shadow command for the "armed wing of the proletariat," all the autonomist leaders, including Negri, were arrested and jailed in April 1979. Others, like Piperno and Scalzone, went into exile (not by their own choice). Paolo Virno was on the editorial board
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of the influential autonomist magazine Metropoli and spent two years in jail before being cleared of all charges. (Twenty-five years later many autono - mists are still in prison). He is now Dean in the Ethics of Communication at the University of Calabria where he gave the three seminars that make up this book in 2001.
Michael Hardt and Toni Negri's Empire makes no explicit reference to this period of social and political creativity, and there is a good reason for that. The American Left at the time was siding with Eurocommunism and considered Autonomia with suspicion. And yet the theses Negri defended then were hardly different from those he is developing today. So what has changed? (Paradoxically, the ghostly presence of Autonomia is felt far more strongly in Empire than in A Grammar of the Multitude where Paolo Virno confronts it head on.) The strategy proved enormously successful. The bulk of reviews and critical studies of Empire now far outweigh its own mass (some 500 pages). Unfortunately, few people will realize that the multitude isn't just a philosophical concept lifted from Spinoza — the democracy of the multitude — that it has a history under another name, and has been the object of vibrant collective experiments. They will never suspect either that the issues raised at the time are being picked up again, and that some kind of intellectual renaissance is presently occurring in Italy. What has been resurfacing recently in the United States with Empire isn't just another American cultural fad ("Empire" replacing "Globalization") but a bold and controversial social laboratory for the present. Virno's A Grammar of the Multitude is another sign of this return.
In "The Strategy of Refusal," published in 1965, Mario Tronti warned against focusing too much on the power of capital, or assume that it curbs labor power to its own ends. Workers are a class for themselves before being a class against capital. Actually, it is always capital that "seeks to use the worker's antagonistic will-to-struggle as a motor for its own development."5 Empire develops the same argument: ca