Paolo Virno

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."