the Philosophy of Antonio Negri

278 Pages·2005·1.51 MB·English

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Resistance in Practice
The Philosophy of Antonio Negri
Edited by
Timothy S. Murphy
and
Abdul-Karim Mustapha
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First published 2005 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Timothy S. Murphy and Abdul-Karim Mustapha 2005
The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the authors of
this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 7453 2338 3 hardback
ISBN 0 7453 2337 5 paperback
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Designed and produced for Pluto Press by
Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England
Typeset from disk by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in the European Union by
Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England
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Contents
Editors’ Acknowledgements vi
Introduction: The Real Movement and the
Present State of Things 1
Timothy S. Murphy and Abdul-Karim Mustapha
Part I: The Long ’68 in Italy
1. Into the Factory: Negri’s Lenin and the Subjective
Caesura (1968–73) 7
Michael Hardt
2. Negri’s Proletarians and the State: A Critique 38
Sergio Bologna
3. Feminism and Autonomy: Itinerary of Struggle 48
Alisa Del Re
4. A Party of Autonomy? 73
Steve Wright
Part II: How to Resist the Present
5. The Refusal of Work as Demand and Perspective 109
Kathi Weeks
6. Cyber-Negri: General Intellect and Immaterial Labor 136
Nick Dyer-Witheford
7. Negri by Zapata: Constituent Power and the
Limits of Autonomy 163
José Rabasa
8. ‘Now Everything Must Be Reinvented’: Negri and Revolution 205
Kenneth Surin
Bibliography 243
Contributors 258
Index 260
v
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Editors’ Acknowledgements
This volume has taken much longer to appear than any of its participants
could have anticipated when they first became involved, and the fact that
it has finally appeared will no doubt surprise some of us. The editors owe
this surprise to a number of people, and since our collaboration has taken
place electronically, our debts only partially overlap.
First of all, I owe an immense debt of gratitude to Steve Wright, who, not
content with his role as contributor, willingly took on every other job
I could find for him: referee, go-between, confidante, introducer, and
others hard to name and harder to do without. Next, I owe it to our trans-
lators, Arianna Bove and Ed Emery, who met more precipitate deadlines
than any other participants were compelled to do. I owe it as well to the
anonymous referees who reviewed the project for Pluto Press, and to Enda
Brophy and Ida Dominijanni, all of whom made important suggestions
that have improved the resulting volume considerably. I owe perhaps
most of all to the patience of the contributors to this volume, some of
whom have waited more than four years to see their chapters in print.
Finally, I owe my coeditor, Abdul-Karim Mustapha, a great debt for origi-
nally conceiving this project, gathering the first contributions and then
permitting me to participate in it as a partner. Here at home, I want to
acknowledge my love for and reliance upon Julie and Blackie through all
the years of this project and so many others.
Timothy S. Murphy
From the beginning of this project, several people are to be thanked for
their resourcefulness and support: Michael Taussig, Jim Fleming, Peter
Lamborn Wilson, and Brian Massumi. I would also like to thank some
members of the Multitudes group in Paris, who have shared much infor-
mation regarding Toni Negri but also incalculable gifts of knowledge and
friendship: Yann Moulier-Boutang, Bruno Karsenti, Maurizio Lazzarato,
Antonella Corsani, Anne Querrien, Charles Wolfe, François Matheron,
Ed Emery, and Guissepe Cocco in Brazil. Furthermore, other people, who
do not appear in this volume but who have worked with Negri and his
thought for some time, gave their time and wisdom to the project: Gabriel
Albiac, Christian Marazzi, Santiago Lopez-Petit, and Fredric Jameson. And
without truth and love, scholarship is never what it can be and for that
I thank Jill E. Baron, Robin F. Garrell, François Laruelle, José Rabasa and
vi
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Editor’s Acknowledgements vii
Catherine Durand. Tim Murphy, my coeditor, deserves much more thanks
in an acknowledgement, since we have never had the chance to meet in
person. His patience, determination, and belief in Negri are unparalleled.
Abdul-Karim Mustapha
Sergio Bologna’s contribution originally appeared in Italian in the journal
Primo Maggio7 (1976), and it is translated here by permission of the author.
The interview with Alisa Del Re originally appeared in Italian on the
CD-ROM that accompanies the volume Futuro anteriore. Dai ‘Quaderni rossi’
ai movimenti globali: ricchezze e limiti dell’operaismo italiano (Rome:
DeriveApprodi, 2002), edited by Guido Borio, Francesca Pozzi, and Gigi
Roggero. It is translated here by permission of the editors.
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Introduction: The Real Movement
and the Present State of Things
Timothy S. Murphy and Abdul-Karim Mustapha
The publication of Empirein 2000 first alerted many in the English-speaking
world to the work of Italian philosopher and militant Antonio Negri. That
book, a synthetic overview of what Marx and Engels would call ‘the present
state of things’ (Marx and Engels 1970: 57), has become a lightning rod for
criticism from the right and the left as well as a fundamental point of ref-
erence for many activists in the growing struggle over globalization. The
magnitude and intensity of the critical polemics over Empire’s basic thesis,
the claim that centralized, national programs of imperialist expansion and
consolidation have given way to a decentered, transnational regime of pro-
duction and governance, can be measured in a number of recent journal
issues and books dedicated to analyzing that thesis and its consequences
(Rethinking Marxism 2001; Strategies 2003; Balakrishnan 2003; Passavant
and Dean 2004). However, many of these recent attempts to assess Negri’s
thought (in both its solo and its collaborative manifestations) are seriously
weakened by their failure to situate Empireand its claims within the wider
contexts of Negri’s overall body of work and the Italian cultural milieu out
of which he emerged. In their haste to theorize the ‘present state of things’,
many of these critics overlook the ‘real movement’ of ideas and activism
that seeks to abolish that state.
Over the past half-century Negri has authored hundreds of articles and
authored, coauthored or edited over 40 books on a staggeringly wide array
of subjects, as well as wielding a defining editorial influence over some of
the most important periodicals and book series in European intellectual
history.1 For much of that time he was also active in several mass move-
ments of the Italian extraparliamentary left (most notably Workers’ Power
(Potere operaio) and Workers’ Autonomy (Autonomia operaia)) as a militant
teacher, strategist and organizer. This unique combination of sophisticated
theory and extensive practice, equaled among Western Marxists perhaps
only by Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács, informs all of Negri’s work,
but its import is too often overlooked by his critics. The purpose of this
volume is to offer critical assessments of Negri’s work that are informed by
more comprehensive engagements with the range of his writings and his
militancy, and not just with the handful of his texts currently in vogue in
1
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2 Resistance in Practice
the English-speaking world. All of the contributors to this volume have
been engaged with Negri’s radical philosophical and/or militant activity
since well before the publication of Empire, and although some of them
analyze Empirewith great care and acuity, they grant it no special priority
over his other works. Each of their contributions reflects the depth and
breadth of engagement that is necessary to understand Negri’s work in the
full conceptual and historical density of its ‘real movement’.
The first part of the volume is focused on Negri’s place in the Italian
countercultural context, which we have labeled ‘the Long ’68’ to mark the
similarity of its origin to that of the events of 1968 in France and else-
where, as well as its difference in extension and intensity: in Italy, 1968 didn’t
come to an end until 1977, while in the rest of Europe and the United
States, 1968 was effectively over before 1969. Michael Hardt, Negri’s chief
collaborator for more than a decade, provides a precise account of Negri’s
complex relationship to Lenin’s thought and its application within the
burgeoning Italian New Left of the Long 1968, as well as a perceptive com-
parison of Negri’s work with that of important parallel figures in France
such as Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. Hardt’s chap-
ter is followed by contributions from two of Negri’s chief allies and inter-
locutors of the Seventies, Sergio Bologna and Alisa Del Re. Bologna’s 1976
review of Negri’s pamphlet Proletarians and the Stateexemplifies the origi-
nality and intensity of critique that characterized the internal intellectual
and organizational dynamics of the Seventies movements, while Del Re’s
recent interview offers a leading feminist’s assessment of the movements’
historical strengths and weaknesses and their continuing influence, with
particular emphasis on Negri’s role as a motivational figure of the era.
Concluding this part is Steve Wright’s comprehensive analysis of debates
over the party form in different sectors of Autonomy, which situates and
criticizes Negri’s (as well as Bologna’s) contributions to these debates by
recovering the full range of political positions that emerged throughout
the period.
The second part provides a set of critical attempts to take up points in
Negri’s work that are relevant to radical militancy in the present. Kathi
Weeks traces the genealogy of the refusal of work from Paul LaFargue to
Negri in order to identify a dissident, antiproductivist legacy within Marxism,
a legacy that has become increasingly influential upon today’s global forms
of workers’ resistance. Nick Dyer-Witheford restages the debate over the
centrality of immaterial labor (that is, intellectual, symbolic and/or affec-
tive labor) to the global regime of production, and on the basis of this
displacement he proposes a critical recuperation of the concept of species
being as a way to fill in the blind spots in Hardt and Negri’s conception of
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Introduction 3
immaterial labor. In what is perhaps the most far-ranging and complex
discussion in this volume, José Rabasa meditates on the relevance of
Negri’s philosophical categories and conceptual tools for programs of local
and regional militancy in Latin America; in Negri’s work he finds the
means to displace the conventional strategies and historical languages of
postcolonial critique, and perhaps to begin to escape from the restrictive
aporias that postcolonial resistance has inherited from deconstruction. In
the concluding essay, Kenneth Surin seeks to expand and intensify Negri’s
theory of revolution by confronting the most radically immaterial register
of globalization, and thus the one seemingly most difficult to contest
through militant practice: the regime of international finance capital. His
sophisticated extension of and supplement to Negri’s ideas, taking ‘Negri
beyond Negri’ as the other contributors also do, helps to bring the man-
darin world of global finance within range of contemporary practices of
resistance.
The interventions contained in this volume unapologetically attempt to
break with the lamentable tradition of internecine squabbling that con-
tinues to mark so much left discourse, both theoretical and organizational.
In what the editors consider to be genuine communist fashion, these chap-
ters strive to join ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of
things’, not by proclaiming their compliance with or rejection of any
immobilizingleft orthodoxy, but rather by resonating with the overall move-
ment of Negri’s compelling and provocative work—extending it, expand-
ing it, displacing it, reworking it and intensifying it. Only in this way,
through processes of differentiation, dissensus, experimentation and
alliance, can we and they contribute to the construction of a truly global
and democratic left, one that abandons the exclusive and reactionary cat-
egories of sectarianism and nationalism in favor of the inclusive logic of
the multitude.
NOTE
1. In addition to his well-known writings on Marx, Spinoza, Lenin, the state-form,
worker phenomenology, postmodernism and globalization, Negri has also published
books or essays on the biblical Book of Job, the Italian Romantic poet Giacomo
Leopardi, mathematical catastrophe theory, and soccer, among other things. He has
been the editor or a leading member of the editorial collective of periodicals such as
Il Progresso Veneto, Quaderni Rossi, Classe Operaia, Contropiano, Potere Operaio, Rosso,
Critica del Diritto, Futur antérieur, Multitudesand Posse, among others.
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