Virno begins by reviving from 17th-century political philosophy the distinction between the concept of the “people” and the concept of the “multitude.” The people is a unified One formed through the establishment of the State. In contrast, the multitude, which Hobbes vilified, is a “plurality which persists as such in the public scene.” The multitude “is the form of social and political existence for the many, seen as being many.” Whereas substantial communities attempted to secure a stable “inside” as a refuge from an uncertain “outside,” the contemporary multitude finds itself exposed to a more uncanny situation, “united by the risk which derives from ‘not feeling at home,’ from being exposed omnilaterally to the world.” Unable to rely on customary, differentiated discourses tied to specific sites and contexts within society, the contemporary multitude must orient and protect itself out in the contingent world through “generic logical-linguistic forms,” what Virno, borrowing from Aristotle, terms “common places.” For the contemporary multitude, confronting a world in which all that is solid has long since melted into air, the human animal’s general linguistic-cognitive capabilities have moved to the “forefront.” The “life of the mind” has become “public,” and the “intellect, even in its most rarefied functions is presented as something common and conspicuous.” This rise of a public intellect needs to be understood in relation to political economy, and specifically in relation to the emergence of the post-Fordist mode of production. Virno proposes to use the category of “virtuosity” to analyze the characteristic labor process of post-Fordism. Virtuosity is “an activity which finds its own fulfillment (that is, its own purpose) in itself, without objectifying itself into an end product.” Virtuosity is also “an activity which requires the presence of others, which exists only in the presence of an audience.” A piano performance by Glenn Gould clearly illustrates these features of virtuosity, but Virno is quick to extend the label of virtuosity to any form of action that is socially oriented and does not result in an “end product.” In fact, the “fundamental model of virtuosity . . . is the activity of the speaker. . . . Every utterance is a virtuosic performance.” Mankind’s “general faculty of language” therefore makes everyone a potential virtuoso. Contemporary production first became virtuosic in the culture industries, which specialized in communicative activity as an end in itself. But the “model of action of the culture industry” has since become “exemplary and pervasive.” Today, “virtuosity . . . not only characterizes the culture industry but the totality of contemporary social production. One could say that in the organization of labor in the post-Ford era, activity without an end product, previously a special and problematic case . . . , becomes the prototype of all wage labor.” Of course material commodities are still produced in mass quantities, but such material production is now differently articulated with immaterial production. “The crucial point is . . . that while the material production of objects is delegated to an automated system of machines, the services rendered by living labor, instead, resemble linguistic-virtuosic services more and more.” In the famous “Fragment on Machines” in the Grundrisse, Marx anticipated these developments. Marx demonstrated how the introduction of automated machinery led labor to step “to the side of the immediate productive process.” For Marx, at least in this fragment, the “general intellect,” the scientific knowledge embodied in machines, historically became the principal productive force. Virno modifies Marx’s argument in order to make it more applicable to the post-Fordist mode of production, which obviously has not used automation to free mankind from the burden of wage labor. Virno argues, “We should consider the dimension where the general intellect instead of being incarnated (or rather, cast in iron) into the system of machines, exists as attribute of living labor. The general intellect manifests itself today, above all, as the communication, abstraction, self-reflection of living subjects. It seems legitimate to maintain that, according to the very logic of economic development, it is necessary that a part of the general intellect not congeal as fixed capital but unfold in communicative interaction, under the guise of epistemic paradigms, dialogical performances, linguistic games.” In extending the general intellect from dead to living labor, Virno also transforms it from a historical notion (about the “progress” of human knowledge and social productivity) into a biological faculty whose potential becomes unleashed and central only at a specific historical stage. He argues, “General intellect should not necessarily mean the aggregate of the knowledge acquired by the species, but the faculty of thinking; potential as such, not its countless particular realizations. The ‘general intellect’ is nothing but the intellect in general.” The general intellect, the “most generic communicative and cognitive faculties of the human animal,” is “pure and simple potential.” It is “the foundation of a social cooperation broader than that cooperation which is specifically related to labor.” But capitalism, which ties the general intellect to wage labor, distorts this potential for cooperation into a “thick net of hierarchical relations” characterized by “personal dependence.” In addition to a radical form of “civil disobedience,” Virno proposes that the general intellect be made politically autonomous through “exit.” “Nothing is less passive than the act of fleeing, of exiting. Defection modifies the conditions within which the struggle takes place, rather than presupposing those conditions to be an unalterable horizon. . . . In short, exit consists of unrestrained invention which alters the rules of the game and throws the adversary completely off balance.” “What is at stake, obviously, is not a spatial ‘frontier,’ but the surplus of knowledge, communication, virtuosic acting in concert, all presupposed by the publicness of the general intellect. Defection allows for a dramatic, autonomous, and affirmative expression of this surplus; and in this way it impedes the ‘transfer’ of this surplus into the power of state administration, impedes its configuration as productive resource of the capitalistic enterprise.” Virno continues to add heterogeneous “philosophical ‘predicates’” to his “grammatical subject” through a fairly routine application of Simondon’s theory of individuation to the production of “the many” of the multitude. He then shows how Foucault’s theory of biopolitics allows one to understand how capitalism takes an increasing interest in the living body of the worker, which only has value as “the substratum” of the immaterial potential of labor-power. Virno concludes with “Ten Theses on the Multitude and Post-Fordist Capitalism”: 1) “Post-Fordism (and with it the multitude) appeared, in Italy, with the social unrest which is generally remembered as the ‘movement of 1977.’” 2) “Post-Fordism is the empirical realization of the “Fragment on Machines” by Marx.” 3) “The crisis of the society of labor is reflected in the multitude itself.” 4) “For the post-Fordist multitude every qualitative difference between labor time and non-labor time falls short.” 5) “In Post-Fordism there exists a permanent disproportion between ‘labor time’ and the more ample ‘production time.’” 6) “In one way, post-Fordism is characterized by the co-existence of the most diverse productive models and, in another way, by essentially homogeneous socialization which takes place outside of the workplace.” 7) “In Post-Fordism, the general intellect does not coincide with fixed capital, but manifests itself principally as a linguistic reiteration of living labor.” 8) “The whole of post-Fordist labor-power, even the most unskilled, is an intellectual labor-power, the ‘intellectuality of the masses.’” 9) “The multitude throws the ‘theory of proletarianization’ out of the mix.” 10) “Post-Fordism is the ‘communism of capital.’”
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Paolo Virno: A Grammar of the Multitude
Virno begins by reviving from 17th-century political philosophy the distinction between the concept of the “people” and the concept of the “multitude.” The people is a unified One formed through the establishment of the State. In contrast, the multitude, which Hobbes vilified, is a “plurality which persists as such in the public scene.” The multitude “is the form of social and political existence for the many, seen as being many.” Whereas substantial communities attempted to secure a stable “inside” as a refuge from an uncertain “outside,” the contemporary multitude finds itself exposed to a more uncanny situation, “united by the risk which derives from ‘not feeling at home,’ from being exposed omnilaterally to the world.” Unable to rely on customary, differentiated discourses tied to specific sites and contexts within society, the contemporary multitude must orient and protect itself out in the contingent world through “generic logical-linguistic forms,” what Virno, borrowing from Aristotle, terms “common places.” For the contemporary multitude, confronting a world in which all that is solid has long since melted into air, the human animal’s general linguistic-cognitive capabilities have moved to the “forefront.” The “life of the mind” has become “public,” and the “intellect, even in its most rarefied functions is presented as something common and conspicuous.” This rise of a public intellect needs to be understood in relation to political economy, and specifically in relation to the emergence of the post-Fordist mode of production. Virno proposes to use the category of “virtuosity” to analyze the characteristic labor process of post-Fordism. Virtuosity is “an activity which finds its own fulfillment (that is, its own purpose) in itself, without objectifying itself into an end product.” Virtuosity is also “an activity which requires the presence of others, which exists only in the presence of an audience.” A piano performance by Glenn Gould clearly illustrates these features of virtuosity, but Virno is quick to extend the label of virtuosity to any form of action that is socially oriented and does not result in an “end product.” In fact, the “fundamental model of virtuosity . . . is the activity of the speaker. . . . Every utterance is a virtuosic performance.” Mankind’s “general faculty of language” therefore makes everyone a potential virtuoso. Contemporary production first became virtuosic in the culture industries, which specialized in communicative activity as an end in itself. But the “model of action of the culture industry” has since become “exemplary and pervasive.” Today, “virtuosity . . . not only characterizes the culture industry but the totality of contemporary social production. One could say that in the organization of labor in the post-Ford era, activity without an end product, previously a special and problematic case . . . , becomes the prototype of all wage labor.” Of course material commodities are still produced in mass quantities, but such material production is now differently articulated with immaterial production. “The crucial point is . . . that while the material production of objects is delegated to an automated system of machines, the services rendered by living labor, instead, resemble linguistic-virtuosic services more and more.” In the famous “Fragment on Machines” in the Grundrisse, Marx anticipated these developments. Marx demonstrated how the introduction of automated machinery led labor to step “to the side of the immediate productive process.” For Marx, at least in this fragment, the “general intellect,” the scientific knowledge embodied in machines, historically became the principal productive force. Virno modifies Marx’s argument in order to make it more applicable to the post-Fordist mode of production, which obviously has not used automation to free mankind from the burden of wage labor. Virno argues, “We should consider the dimension where the general intellect instead of being incarnated (or rather, cast in iron) into the system of machines, exists as attribute of living labor. The general intellect manifests itself today, above all, as the communication, abstraction, self-reflection of living subjects. It seems legitimate to maintain that, according to the very logic of economic development, it is necessary that a part of the general intellect not congeal as fixed capital but unfold in communicative interaction, under the guise of epistemic paradigms, dialogical performances, linguistic games.” In extending the general intellect from dead to living labor, Virno also transforms it from a historical notion (about the “progress” of human knowledge and social productivity) into a biological faculty whose potential becomes unleashed and central only at a specific historical stage. He argues, “General intellect should not necessarily mean the aggregate of the knowledge acquired by the species, but the faculty of thinking; potential as such, not its countless particular realizations. The ‘general intellect’ is nothing but the intellect in general.” The general intellect, the “most generic communicative and cognitive faculties of the human animal,” is “pure and simple potential.” It is “the foundation of a social cooperation broader than that cooperation which is specifically related to labor.” But capitalism, which ties the general intellect to wage labor, distorts this potential for cooperation into a “thick net of hierarchical relations” characterized by “personal dependence.” In addition to a radical form of “civil disobedience,” Virno proposes that the general intellect be made politically autonomous through “exit.” “Nothing is less passive than the act of fleeing, of exiting. Defection modifies the conditions within which the struggle takes place, rather than presupposing those conditions to be an unalterable horizon. . . . In short, exit consists of unrestrained invention which alters the rules of the game and throws the adversary completely off balance.” “What is at stake, obviously, is not a spatial ‘frontier,’ but the surplus of knowledge, communication, virtuosic acting in concert, all presupposed by the publicness of the general intellect. Defection allows for a dramatic, autonomous, and affirmative expression of this surplus; and in this way it impedes the ‘transfer’ of this surplus into the power of state administration, impedes its configuration as productive resource of the capitalistic enterprise.” Virno continues to add heterogeneous “philosophical ‘predicates’” to his “grammatical subject” through a fairly routine application of Simondon’s theory of individuation to the production of “the many” of the multitude. He then shows how Foucault’s theory of biopolitics allows one to understand how capitalism takes an increasing interest in the living body of the worker, which only has value as “the substratum” of the immaterial potential of labor-power. Virno concludes with “Ten Theses on the Multitude and Post-Fordist Capitalism”: 1) “Post-Fordism (and with it the multitude) appeared, in Italy, with the social unrest which is generally remembered as the ‘movement of 1977.’” 2) “Post-Fordism is the empirical realization of the “Fragment on Machines” by Marx.” 3) “The crisis of the society of labor is reflected in the multitude itself.” 4) “For the post-Fordist multitude every qualitative difference between labor time and non-labor time falls short.” 5) “In Post-Fordism there exists a permanent disproportion between ‘labor time’ and the more ample ‘production time.’” 6) “In one way, post-Fordism is characterized by the co-existence of the most diverse productive models and, in another way, by essentially homogeneous socialization which takes place outside of the workplace.” 7) “In Post-Fordism, the general intellect does not coincide with fixed capital, but manifests itself principally as a linguistic reiteration of living labor.” 8) “The whole of post-Fordist labor-power, even the most unskilled, is an intellectual labor-power, the ‘intellectuality of the masses.’” 9) “The multitude throws the ‘theory of proletarianization’ out of the mix.” 10) “Post-Fordism is the ‘communism of capital.’”
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