Negri on Negri is a book of interviews that gives a gentle introduction to Toni Negri’s thought. It’s worth reading because Negri is one of the few contemporary thinkers who is really trying to work out radical alternatives to our current regime of postmodernity and globalization. Negri and Michael Hardt’s book Empire is clearly one of the key texts of the new century, something that anyone interested in political change needs to come to terms with — even if I find much of it problematic.
Negri on Negri is a much “lighter” book than Empire, but that makes it good as an introduction. Negri goes into his life and political career — his work as a political activist in Italy, the disturbances at the time of the Red Brigades, with whom he had a certain sympathy but which he was falsely accused of supporting and even masterminding, his years in jail, his years in exile in France, his ultimate return to Italy and more time in jail. This all provides a background to a thought that remains, in spite of everything, incredibly cheerful and optimistic.
Negri’s current thought is grounded in the changes that the world has gone through in the last thirty years or so: changes from industrial capitalism to a “knowledge economy,” and from the Cold War to a global marketplace, in which corporations have become more powerful than nation-states. In this new economy, traditional distinctions of place and time, between physical and intellectual labor, and indeed between labor and leisure, have pretty much disappeared. This metamorphosis is what doomed the radical movements — left of the Communist Party — to which Negri devoted his life in the 1960s and 1970s.
For Negri, traditional Marxism, with its traditional notion of the “working class,” no longer makes any sense under these changed conditions. But this does not mean that he capitulates to the idea that the worldwide capitalist marketplace is the ultimate horizon of possibility, the only thinkable social arrangement. Instead, Negri seeks to reinvent Marxism for these changed conditions, for the changed (but still quite horrible) new configurations of capitalism.
Basically, Negri argues that capitalist “production” is no longer a specific category or specific portion of society. It is no longer the “base,” in comparison to which everything else would be a mere “superstructure.” Rather, capitalist production is everything and everywhere — and quite directly so. It’s brain power as well as machinery, leisure time as well as work time, recreation as well as reproduction, inner thoughts as well as outer actions.
This is the situation foreseen by Adorno and his colleagues in the Frankfurt School, who presaged a state of society in which all independence would be exterminated, and everything would be subjected to the “laws” of capitalism, commodification, and instrumental reason.
But the situation that Adorno viewed with unalloyed horror is seen by Negri as a source of hope — seen with an almost insane optimism. For Negri, such a condition means that oppression is really in its last extremity: if globalized, informational capitalism seems to have appropriated everything, with no remainder, it’s because this “everything” is now something that we are all directly involved in, and that we can therefore reappropriate. Indeed, for Negri, the conditions have never been so propitious. Capitalism’s own mechanisms and technologies have made the overcoming of alienation, and of scarcity, possible for the very first time. Negri thus rejects the forms and categories of old-fashioned Marxism, in order the better to establish Marxism’s oldest utopian premise and promise, that of universal “communism.” Global capitalist oppression has ironically created the conditions for global freedom to be almost within our grasp.
Now, all this is so wildly, insanely optimistic that I don’t believe it for a second. Nonetheless, I can’t help finding Negri’s ideas beautiful and inspiring. For they rest on a sense of life as a joyous, ongoing process of creation and collaboration, of what Negri calls the “common,” or “the liberty of being-together”: the amassing of multiple “singularities” without them ever fusing into a fixed identity. These pages are filled with paeans (I can’t believe that I am actually using this word) to “the pleasure of singularity” (149), or to “the moment when the arrow of Being is shot, the moment of opening, the invention of Being on the edge of time. We live at each instant on this margin of Being that is endlessly being constructed” (104). I feel enlivened by Negri’s celebration of singularity, plurality, invention, and imagination, even if I am unable to share his materialist and (post)humanist faith.
I can’t remember who it was who said that the great thing about Negri was how he countered the self-deluding voluntarism of Gramsci’s “pessmism of the intellect, optimism of the will” with an attitude of “optimism of the intellect,” even in the face of an inevitable (given the history of how revolutions have been defeated, or turned into something worse when they succeeded) “pessimism of the will.”
Negri on Negri
Negri on Negri is a book of interviews that gives a gentle introduction to Toni Negri’s thought. It’s worth reading because Negri is one of the few contemporary thinkers who is really trying to work out radical alternatives to our current regime of postmodernity and globalization. Negri and Michael Hardt’s book Empire is clearly one of the key texts of the new century, something that anyone interested in political change needs to come to terms with — even if I find much of it problematic.
Negri on Negri is a much “lighter” book than Empire, but that makes it good as an introduction. Negri goes into his life and political career — his work as a political activist in Italy, the disturbances at the time of the Red Brigades, with whom he had a certain sympathy but which he was falsely accused of supporting and even masterminding, his years in jail, his years in exile in France, his ultimate return to Italy and more time in jail. This all provides a background to a thought that remains, in spite of everything, incredibly cheerful and optimistic.
Negri’s current thought is grounded in the changes that the world has gone through in the last thirty years or so: changes from industrial capitalism to a “knowledge economy,” and from the Cold War to a global marketplace, in which corporations have become more powerful than nation-states. In this new economy, traditional distinctions of place and time, between physical and intellectual labor, and indeed between labor and leisure, have pretty much disappeared. This metamorphosis is what doomed the radical movements — left of the Communist Party — to which Negri devoted his life in the 1960s and 1970s.
For Negri, traditional Marxism, with its traditional notion of the “working class,” no longer makes any sense under these changed conditions. But this does not mean that he capitulates to the idea that the worldwide capitalist marketplace is the ultimate horizon of possibility, the only thinkable social arrangement. Instead, Negri seeks to reinvent Marxism for these changed conditions, for the changed (but still quite horrible) new configurations of capitalism.
Basically, Negri argues that capitalist “production” is no longer a specific category or specific portion of society. It is no longer the “base,” in comparison to which everything else would be a mere “superstructure.” Rather, capitalist production is everything and everywhere — and quite directly so. It’s brain power as well as machinery, leisure time as well as work time, recreation as well as reproduction, inner thoughts as well as outer actions.
This is the situation foreseen by Adorno and his colleagues in the Frankfurt School, who presaged a state of society in which all independence would be exterminated, and everything would be subjected to the “laws” of capitalism, commodification, and instrumental reason.
But the situation that Adorno viewed with unalloyed horror is seen by Negri as a source of hope — seen with an almost insane optimism. For Negri, such a condition means that oppression is really in its last extremity: if globalized, informational capitalism seems to have appropriated everything, with no remainder, it’s because this “everything” is now something that we are all directly involved in, and that we can therefore reappropriate. Indeed, for Negri, the conditions have never been so propitious. Capitalism’s own mechanisms and technologies have made the overcoming of alienation, and of scarcity, possible for the very first time. Negri thus rejects the forms and categories of old-fashioned Marxism, in order the better to establish Marxism’s oldest utopian premise and promise, that of universal “communism.” Global capitalist oppression has ironically created the conditions for global freedom to be almost within our grasp.
Now, all this is so wildly, insanely optimistic that I don’t believe it for a second. Nonetheless, I can’t help finding Negri’s ideas beautiful and inspiring. For they rest on a sense of life as a joyous, ongoing process of creation and collaboration, of what Negri calls the “common,” or “the liberty of being-together”: the amassing of multiple “singularities” without them ever fusing into a fixed identity. These pages are filled with paeans (I can’t believe that I am actually using this word) to “the pleasure of singularity” (149), or to “the moment when the arrow of Being is shot, the moment of opening, the invention of Being on the edge of time. We live at each instant on this margin of Being that is endlessly being constructed” (104). I feel enlivened by Negri’s celebration of singularity, plurality, invention, and imagination, even if I am unable to share his materialist and (post)humanist faith.
I can’t remember who it was who said that the great thing about Negri was how he countered the self-deluding voluntarism of Gramsci’s “pessmism of the intellect, optimism of the will” with an attitude of “optimism of the intellect,” even in the face of an inevitable (given the history of how revolutions have been defeated, or turned into something worse when they succeeded) “pessimism of the will.”
One thought on “Negri on Negri”
Comments are closed.