Paolo Virno

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Bio

Paolo Virno is an Italian radical who has been instrumental in thinking through the new concept of the Multitude. He was historically a part of the Autonomist tradition.


Interview

Excerpts from an interview, at http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=06/01/17/2225239

"Paolo Virno: The decisive experience of my youth was the revolutionary struggle in a developed capitalist country. I insist: developed. A country, that is, in which physical survival was guaranteed, consumption relatively high, with by that time widespread scholastic instruction. I did not participate in an uprising against misery or dictatorship but in a radical conflict aiming at abolishing that modern form of barbarism: wage labor. We were not “thirdworldist" but “Americanist." Fighting at Fiat of Turin, we were thinking of Detroit, not Cuba or Algiers. Only where capitalist development has reached its height is there a question of the anticapitalist revolution. This setup has allowed us to read Marx without “Marxism" — to read Marx, putting him in direct contact with the most radical social fights and on the other hand intertwining the reading of him with the great authors of bourgeois modernity (Weber, Keynes, Nietzsche, Heidegger, etc.).

I participated in the group Potere Operaio (among whose directors was also Toni Negri), contributing as much as I could to organize fierce strikes at Fiat and the occupation of unrented houses in Rome. In 1979 I was arrested in the trial of Autonomia Operaia— three years of preventive jail, one of house arrest, finally (in 1987), full exoneration in the appeals process.

I have always occupied myself with philosophy, and I have always written about it. I was hard pressed to work on a nonreductionist, broadly conceived materialism capable of explaining rationally all that a “linguistic animal" (which is to say, a human being) does, thinks, desires.

The first book was published in 1986 and is entitled Convenzione e materialismo [Convention and Materialism]; the latest in 2003 is entitled Quando il verbo si fa carne. Linguaggio e natura umana [When the Verb Becomes Flesh: Language and Human Nature]. At the end of the 1980s, I was engaged with others in tracing the fundamental traits of “post-Fordism": the intellectual labor of the masses, flexibility, and so on. From 1990 to 1993, I contributed to the journal Luogo Comune, afterward to the journal Derive Approdi."


Critique

PJ Rey:

"I think Virno (and his supporters) are right to situate the Web in the broader context of post-Fordism; however, I have three related critiques of Virno’s analysis: 1.) Virno retains what Ritzer and others have called “a productivist bias.” There is very little to discussion of how consumption factors into post-Fordism and whatever indirect references exist are to the Frankfurt School, which (as Virno rightly notes) does not seem to capture or anticipate our present reality. In any case, Virno (p. 59) is ultimately using the theories of Frankfurt School to analyze various modes of cultural production and not consumption. What Virno misses is that, in the current paradigm, consumption has been reintegrated into production. Treating the two separately no longer makes sense (and, perhaps, never did). This is made clear when examining social media. It is very difficult to delineate where production ends and consumption begins. Both are really part of the same (prosumption) process. 2.) The priority given to economic relations in Marx’s dialectical materialism still seems to persist in Virno’s ostensibly post-Marxian framework. In fact, Virno defines contemporary social life almost exclusively in economic terms. And while he does argue that economics and politics implode in the post-Fordist era, his concept of politics is more philosophical than sociological. He is concerned with the abstract form of politics (as imagined by the Ancient Greeks) and not so much with culturally and historically specific struggles (save for his one pet case, Italy’s failed revolution of 1977). This critique should not be overstated. Virno certainly has made the Gramscian turn in some ways. He argues that the multitude take a variety of (better or worse) configurations under the same economic conditions, but his high level of abstraction in examining economic relations tends to give the impression that post-Fordism will unfold uniformly across national and demographic boundaries. However, these boundaries remain very real and different groups and state apparatuses will react to post-Fordism differently. 3.) Virno’s tendency to focus on abstract categories—overlooking national and cultural divisions—leads to what is, perhaps, an overly optimistic view of the multitude. Particularly, his claim that there is solidarity in the uniform socialization experienced by the multitude seems to utterly ignore persisting divisions on the basis of gender, race, age, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, etc. Virno wants the basis for universal epistemology, but it seems to me that only a white male philosopher could be in such a position of privilege to imagine socialization being all that uniform across these categories. In the day-to-day lives of individuals, economic relations just do not have the salience Virno affords them." (http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2012/07/05/notes-on-virno-the-multitude-and-the-web/)

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