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Time for Revolution PDF

303 Pages·2004·8.1 MB·English
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Time fo r Revolution explores the burning issue of our times: is there still a place for resistance in a society utterly subsumed by capitalism? Written in prison two decades apart, these two essays reflect Antonio Negri’s abiding interest in the philosophy of time and resistance. The first essay traces the fracture lines which force capitalist society into perpetual crisis. The second, written immediately after the global bestseller, Empire, develops the two key concepts of empire and multitude. Time fo r Revolution illuminates the course of Negri’s thinking from the 1980s to Empire and beyond. p r a i s e f o r E m p i r e 4How often can it happen that a book is swept o ff the shelves until you can't fin d a copy in New York for love nor m oney?' 0 It S E It V E It ‘ Whether presenting new concepts - like Empire and multitude - or urging revolution, it brims with confidence in its ideas.' N ew Y ork T imes \ . . a philosophical vision that some have greeted as the “next big thing" in the field oj the humanities.' S u n d a y Tim es ‘Empire has com e as close to becom ing an international best seller as a book dense with references to Spinoza, Marx and Deleuze is likely to g e l . . . it has become a cult book am ong the anti-globalization protest movement, praised from Berkeley and Buenos Aires to London and Paris.' N ew Y oiik R e v i e w of R o o k s Time f o r Revolution ANTONIO NEGRI Translated by Matteo Mandarini T FILOZOFSKI FAKULTET« MUMANISTIČKF I DtaJSTVENč JN*«BSTl p Q B C B - Đu <E SALAJA BROJ t KnJUnioa Fiioztfijskaia Seminar« u ^.agrsby Sign. Inv. br. coritinuum • W W N E W YORK • L O N D O N Continuum The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London, SEl 7NX 370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017-6303 © Antonio Negri, 2003 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. La consituzione del tempo © Manifestolibri 1997 Kairds, Alma Venus, Multido © Manifestolibri 2000 English translation © Continuum 2003 Introduction and editorial © Continuum 2003 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 0-8264-3931-5 (hardback) Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset in Adobe Garamond by RefineCarch Limited Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd. Bodmin, Cornwall Contents Acknowledgements Translator’s introduction The Constitution of Time .. , , n filozofski Preamble , huwawsi'^' • Et-CJ ■<1 u 6 R B _ , • j-. vr ' 1 First Displacement: the time of subsumed being 1.1 Time-as-measure and productive time 1.2 Tautology and composition 1.3 An Umwelt of antagonism 1.4 Displacement, hysteresis, asymmetry, innovation 2 First Construction: collective time A 2.1 Ascesis and ecstasy: analytic of circulation 3 First Construction: collective time B 3.1 Crisis: towards a phenomenology of collective praxis 4 Second Construction: productive time A 4.1 Money, value, nomenclature: between timepiece and war 4.2 Energy: evanescence of space 5 Second Construction: productive time B 5.1 Refusal of work and productive co-operation 5.2 Internal time and external time 6 Third Construction: constitutive time A 6.1 The hard time of the State: information and legitimation IV CONTENTS 7 Third Construction: constitutive time B 91 7.1 Time of class struggle: the new institutionality 91 7.2 Pluralism and dualism: on the logical matrices 97 7.3 The body and the time of constitution 102 8 Second Displacement: the time of the revolution W 107 8.1 The project and death: now-time {Jetzt-Zeit) 107 8.2 Endogenous processes and exogenous processes: analytic and catastrophe 113 9 Third Displacement: the time of the revolution Y 120 9.1 The time machine 120 9.2 Constitution and class struggle 122 Afterword 127 Kairds, Alma Venus, Multitudo Introduction 139 Kairos 147 Prolegomena 147 The common name 147 The immeasurable 159 The materialist field 1^9 Alma Venus 1 ® ^ Prolegomena 1 ® ^ Tt 181 1 he common Poverty ^ Love 2°9 Multitudo 22^ Prolegomena 22^ Politics 22^ Living labour 2^5 The decision 248 262 Notes Bibliography 290 Acknowledgements I would like to start by thanking Tristan Palmer and Rowan Wilson at Continuum for their patience and assistance throughout this project. 1 have also been fortunate to have had the encouragement of Michael Hardt, whose skills as a reader have been invaluable. I am indebted to Stephen Houlgate for tracing a reference to Hegel from a single (mistranslated) word. Susan and Francesco Mandarini provided indispensable support and advice from the beginning to the end of this project - it could not have happened without them. Thanks to Juliet Rufford for showing extraordinary patience and perseverance with my syntax and me. The introduction is a good deal less opaque thanks to her hard work. And I would also like to thank Eliot Albert, Tariq Goddard and Alberto Toscano for many hours of debate that, in one way or another, found their way into this book. Alberto Toscano pro­ vided typically incisive comments on several drafts of this introduction and suggestions for the notes to the translations themselves. Finally, I am most grateful to Antonio Negri for suggesting that I bring together these two texts in the first place. I have gained a great deal from reading, translating and writing about his work but even more from his intellectual generosity and commitment. Matteo Mandarini Translator’s introduction Labour is the living, form-giving fire; it is the transitoriness of things, their temporality, as their formation by living time. (Karl Marx, Grundrisse) The two texts by Antonio Negri, translated into English and brought together here for the first time, display a formidable capacity for com­ pression. The Constitution o f Time (1981) - originally published as the final chapter of the collection of essays Macchina tempo (Negri 1982a), covering the period 1976—81 - arguably represents the high point of the theoretical and practical work carried out over the course of a decade or more by Antonio Negri and his comrades and collaborators, while it also exhibits the productive aporias,1 the resolution of which would occupy Negri over the next decade. Kairbs, Alma Venus, Multi- tudo (2000a), Negri’s latest book, matches the earlier work in terms of its force of concentration, drawing together in a single, dense text the results of the work that followed The Constitution o f Time in the 1980s and 1990s. Kairbs, Alma Venus, Multitudo was written after Negri’s work on Empire was finished, yet it represents a deepening of the conceptual assemblage provided in the latter collaborative work. Antonio Negri’s writings are notoriously difficult in the Italian, and they become doubly so for a reader who is largely unacquainted with the debates of Operaismo.2 The situation has not been helped by the almost complete self-censorship of the Italian publishing world follow­ ing the suppression of il Movimento and the ‘counter-revolution’ of the 1980s, which saw many of the writings of some of the major theorists of the 1970s (including those of Negri) disappear from circulation.3 Raniero Panzieri’s Lotte Operaie Nello Sviluppo Capitalistico (1976b) and extracts from Mario Tronti’s seminal Operai e Capitale (1966) were translated into English, if only in relatively obscure journals and collec­ tions, in the late 1970s and early 1980s,4 but their isolation from il Movimento (many of whose members were either in prison or exile) meant that they were never able to become components of a broader 2 TIME FOR REVOLUTION international debate and social movement. In recent years, a number of thinkers have begun to remedy this situation.5 But the works they have produced, and even Empire itself, would have failed to make the impact that they have made outside the academy had their publication not intersected with the emerging, global subjectivities of what, in Italy, has become known as IIpopolo di Seattle and the new cycle of struggles that has - so far - led from the American city to Genoa, Barcelona and Florence. For The Constitution o f Time, I have provided some further informa­ tion for the reader (mainly drawn from Negri’s own writings) in the translator’s notes. In the case of Kairds, Alma Venus, Multitudo, I have let what is a remarkably self-sufficient text speak largely for itself. Its development is driven by an autonomous logic, a cumulative com­ position, and exhibits constant feedback-effects that perpetually unground and refound it. From first, second, third ... to nth founda­ tion. Too many notes would only dislocate the consistency of the composition, as would too many external references. Conversely, The Constitution o f Time is heavily interspersed with citations and refer­ ences. While in prison Antonio Negri used notebooks to jot these down from the limited number of books he was allowed to have at any one time. As he recalled in his 1997 Introduction (reprinted here as an Afterword), many of these notebooks were ‘destroyed in the piss and fire of the repressors, for no other reason than that dictated by the revenge of a rabble of cowardly and ignorant prison guards’. Despite his and my best efforts, it has been impossible to track some of these references down. The Bibliography is thus reconstructed almost entirely from memory and guesswork. In 1981 Antonio Negri had been in prison for almost two years pending trial. He would remain there for another two before his election as Radical Party member to parliament and, following the subsequent Chamber of Deputies’ vote to rescind his parliamentary immunity, his flight into exile in Paris. Perhaps these particular circumstances, in which ‘re-education to virtue is reached through idleness (Kairds) as Negri would say with some irony when he once again found himself two years into an Italian prison sentence (1999),6 were those most conducive to taking stock of the theoretical and practical work accomplished over the preceding years. Two different prisons; two different books. But it is not just the circumstances of composition that link these translator’s introduction 3 texts together. Nor is it simply the recapitulative force, the extraordinary compression and the desire to make sense of the intense years that preceded, common to both these texts, that make the present volume more than an arbitrary collection. It provides indispensable material for understanding the development of Negri’s thought - not only that carried out in his years of exile, but also the collaborative work with Michael Hardt - and for grasping the new possibilities for collective action in the face of the new Imperial forms of capitalist accumulation, which represent the abiding concern of Negri’s theoretical labour. Taken together, then, the texts elucidate the course of Negri’s thinking from Marx Beyond Marx (1979) to Empire (2000), from proletarian self-valorization to the constellations of co-operating multitudes. The red thread that links the two, as the title for this collection suggests, is that of temporality. / In order to situate the two texts translated here a brief account of Empire is in order. The widely debated theoretical synthesis that Empire represents has been able to ‘tap into’ and give rational expression to the optimism expressed in the new age of militancy that emerged in the mid-1990s - thus bringing to a welcome conclusion the short-lived triumphalism of the champions of the ‘end of history’. Taking up again some of the founding principles of Operaismo, Hardt and Negri argue that during the last quarter of the twentieth century, capital has been forced to restructure in order to break the workers’ and anti-colonial struggles that had shattered its previous regime of accumulation. Restructuring followed upon struggle. As Hardt and Negri put it in their account of the power of the multitude — the antagonistic subject of‘Empire’ - when the ‘action of Empire is effective, this is due not to its own force but to the fact that it is driven by the rebound from the resistance of the multitude against imperial power’ (Hardt and Negri 2000, p. 360). Thus, the much vaunted triumph of capital that global­ ization is supposed to embody is not a sign of the health and creativity of capital but rather the effect of struggles that could no longer be regulated within the nation state. Capital’s response to such struggles

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Written in prison two decades apart, these two essays reflect Antonio Negri's abiding interest in the philosophy of time and resistance. The first essay traces the fracture lines that force capitalist society into perpetual crisis. The second, written immediately after the global bestseller, Empire,
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