I just learned this morning that Paolo Virno has died. Virno's work has been a huge influence on both my writing and my teaching. In my class on work we regularly read the chapter "Labor, Work, Intellect" from Grammar of the Multitude for the way it updates both Arendt and Marx for the late twenty-first century. Of all of the post-autonomist turns to the transformations of labor, his is the most engaging. His influence on my writing is even stronger. His investigation of the concept of transindividuality is second only to Balibar's in getting me to write a book about it. What follows is an excerpt from that book.
As Marx writes,
Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are the products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge objectified [vergegenständlichte Wissenskraft]. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it.
For Marx the development of this general intellect takes the form of machinery, scientific knowledge, and technology. Thus, in the same notebook, Marx describes a fundamental transformation in the status of labour power, it ceases to the motive, or even directive force of the productive process, to become merely a conscious organ; ‘it relates more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself.’ Marx’s fragmentary analysis in the notebook envisions a future in which capital, as ‘the moving contradiction’ undoes its own basis, undoing labour as the measure of wealth. The status of this concept of the general intellect, its more or less fragmentary, or even orphaned place in Marx’s writing, as a word or concept more mentioned than developed, has opened the door to multiple attempts to develop its content, filling in either the philosophy, that Marx excluded, or the history that he could not envision.
Virno offers two correctives to Marx’s projection, two correctives that begin to transform Marx’s picture of a demise of capitalism to the basis for a description of Post-Fordist Production. First, Virno argues that much of what Marx has described has come to pass, knowledge has become a dominant productive force, transforming capitalism, but this has not led to an emancipatory reversal. There has been no reduction of working time, or liberation from wage labour. ‘Labour time is the unit of measurement in use, but no longer the true unit of measurement.’ Second, what Marx failed to grasp, or predict, was the extent to which ‘the general intellect manifests itself as living labour.’ The general knowledge of society is manifest not just in machines, technology from the locomotive to the Internet, but also in living labour, in the diffused knowledge of workers that interact not just with technology, but with increasingly complex social relations. Virno’s correction of Marx encounters the same question of the relation of technology and social relations as Simondon, as much as technology, specifically the machinery of mass industry, forms the basis for thinking about transindividuality, it cannot be reduced to it. It is necessary to also consider the transindividual character of general social knowledge. Virno insists, on a point that will be crucial to his understanding of transindividuality and anthropogenesis, that this knowledge is not the specialized knowledge of scientists, engineers, and web designers, but knowledge as a generic capacity. ‘The general intellect is nothing but the intellect in general.’ This is due to the fact that this knowledge concerns the most fundamental capacities of human existence, such as language and the capacity to learn, but it is also due to the instability and precariousness of the job market. As individuals are shifted from job to job, intellect is defined more and more as the capacity to learn new tasks, new protocols and programs, rather than a set body of knowledge. This can be seen in the increased emphasis, in job training and literature, which focus on professionalism rather than specialization. As Virno writes,
Specialization is something impersonal, an objective requirement that can be evaluated based on shared parameters. Professionalism on the other hand is seen as a subjective property, a form of know-how inseparable from the individual person; it is a sum of knowledges, experiences, attitudes, and a certain sensibility. Correctly understood, post-Fordist ‘professionality’ does not correspond to any precise profession. It consists rather of certain character traits.
Professionality is ultimately a manifestation one’s generic capacity to act and relate in the world. While Fordism stressed stability, fixing people to machines and their place in the productive process, Post-Fordism does not stress any particular traits, but the capacity to develop new traits. Thus, moving from the limits and possibilities of Marx’s text, to a general definition, Post-Fordism is understood to be a transformation of both the stability of work, the repetition and habit that constituted its world, and the integration of communication, knowledge, and social relations into the productive process.
The effects of this transformation are not just limited to insecurity and instability. The entry of the general intellect into the production process transforms the basis of the ‘real abstraction.’ The term ‘real abstraction’ is framed between Marx’s Grundrisse and Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s Intellectual and Manual Labour. In the former Marx argues that the concept of labour, as an abstract general idea, is a practical and effective reality only at a given historical juncture, and due to historical transformations. Labour, labour indifferent to its activity and object, becomes a reality only with the development of capitalism and the technology and social relations that make it flexible and indifferent. While Marx introduced the idea of abstraction becoming a historical and practical reality, Sohn-Rethel developed and deepened this idea, turning not to labour, and abstract labour, but focusing on exchange rather than labour to develop the reality of abstraction. For Sohn-Rethel the true scandal of Marx’s thought, at least in terms of philosophy, is in positing an abstraction that has practice rather than thought as its origin and genesis. The abstraction of exchange value takes place in the practice of the exchange of commodities, not in the consciousness of the actors. Commodity exchange, and with it the whole sphere of value, presupposes an abstraction that is lived more than it is comprehended. Sohn-Rethel’s primary emphasis here is on the practical, which is to say material basis of this abstraction, but it is equally possible to say that this abstraction is transindividual. This could constitute a second scandal, one that confronts not the mental nature of abstraction but the solitary nature. As Sohn-Rethel writes, ‘Nothing that a single commodity-owner might undertake on his own could give rise to this abstraction, no more than a hammock could play its part when attached to one pole only.’ Virno draws ambiguously from both of these sources to argue for a historicization of the real abstraction. The distinction is loosely framed on the distinction between Fordism and post-Fordism, between the productivity of labour as abstract and interchangeable and the productivity of a general social knowledge. This distinction is framed in terms of two different dominant real abstractions, the first, money and the commodity form, abstractions of equivalence, while the second phase of real abstraction is marked by the general intellect. As Virno writes,
Whereas money, the ‘universal equivalent’ itself incarnates in its independent existence the commensurability of products, jobs, and subjects, the general intellect instead stabilizes the analytic premises of every type of practice. Models of social knowledge do not equate the various activities of labour, but rather present themselves as the ‘immediate forces of production.
The transformation of the real abstraction is a transformation of the production process, but is not limited to it, extending beyond it to encompass social relations. The real abstractions of Fordism, money and the labour form, stressed equivalence, rendering different types of work interchangeable. It is from this equivalent that the ‘sphere of exchange’ derives its particular liberatory image, the idea of ‘freedom, equality, and Bentham.’ Virno argues, echoing some of the themes of The Communist Manifesto, that this equivalent has an inescapable liberatory dimension, an equivalent that tears ‘asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors.’ Virno follows what is arguably the most celebratory of Marx’s texts, the most willing to recognize the revolutionary dimension of capitalism, in arguing that this equivalence, the fact that the different labours of different individuals, regardless of race, gender, or age, are all part of abstract labour is liberatory or egalitarian. To risk a rough parallel with Balibar, Virno’s figure of the worker and not the citizen is his egalitarian prehistory of the present. Understanding these entails turning to a particular aside of Marx. In the passage on “commodity fetishism” Marx draws a parallel between a society of commodity produces predicated on abstract labour and forms of Christianity such as deism that extol “man in the abstract.” Whereas we previously argued that this ideal of isolated humanity is itself a kind of fetish, a fragmentation and effacement of existing social relations, Virno posits an egalitarian dimension. Capital is on some level indifferent to the categories and definitions that would separate different individuals and their labor. The real abstractions of the wage, commodity, and abstract labour conceal exploitation but espouse equivalence. The change of the general equivalent is then a change of the general set of values and norms underlying capitalism. Whereas the real abstractions of Fordism posited an equivalence between different individuals, the real abstractions of post-Fordism, of the general intellect, stresses the incommensurability of these different forms of knowledge. The abstraction of equivalence is replaced with the radical difference between different productive protocols. The shift from one real abstraction to another is also a shift from in values and ideals.
For Virno, Post-Fordist labour and the general intellect directly engages and puts to work the transindividual dimensions of existence. Making sense of this claim involves unpacking the specific modality of transindividuality in Virno’s thought. In the Grundrisse, in the same notebooks that detail the general intellect, Marx also coins the term ‘social individual’ as the cornerstone of wealth, produced not only in the workshop, or formal education, but in free time as well. To some extent the very appearance of this phrase begins to suggest that Virno’s second correction is not entirely alien from Marx’s thought, there is already in the notebooks at least a nascent idea of the general intellect as living labour, as a productive activity. However, the appearance of the formulation in the same notebooks as Marx’s depiction of knowledge as a productive force makes it possible to see both of these phenomena as connected. For Marx this connection is to be found in the most advanced period of capitalism that he knows, that of the emerging factory, while for Virno they are best understand to anticipate post-Fordism. Virno says little about the role of transindividuality in cooperation and the labour process in Marx’s analysis of capital, focusing on the shift to post-Fordism. More importantly, this formulation of an individual that is simultaneously ‘individual’ and ‘social’ makes it possible to connect Marx’s thought, with Simondon’s ontology. As Virno writes, defining one by means of the other, ‘Social should be translated as pre-individual, and ‘individual’ should be seen as the ultimate result of the process of individuation.’
Virno’s translation of Marx’s terms into Simondon’s underscores the specific way in which he is making sense of the latter’s ontology. Virno argues that the preindividual basis of individuation is made up of three components, sensation and habits, language, and the relations of production. The first of these is identified as natural, the second historico-natural, and the last, the relations of production, is historical. Thus it is possible to understand Virno as dividing the pre-individual between its natural and historical components, splitting the difference between Simondon’s formulation and Stiegler’s interpretation. Of all these terms, the historico-natural is perhaps the most in need of clarification, especially since it becomes increasingly central to Virno’s philosophical anthropology. Language is historico-natural in that it is both the product of a natural capacity, mouth, lips, tongue, brain, but one that can only take its formation at a given historical capacity, as much as nature describes the capacity for language, any given language is the product of history. Virno differentiates these component elements of the preindividual, situating some with nature and others with history, in order to unravel some of the knot that ties nature and culture, materiality and spirit. However, Virno maintains two of Simondon’s fundamental theses, that individuality is never concluded, never finished, it is a process of individuation; and, secondly, that the collective is not the suppression of individuation, but a constitutive element of this process. This collective in which individuals continue the process of individuation, is itself an organization of the preindividual, as the capacity for language becomes a particular language, and the biological possibility of habits are organized in determinate habits and relations. As Virno writes, ‘The collective is the sphere in which the pre-individual becomes the transindividual.’ Most importantly Virno utilizes Simondon to make a central point, about contemporary production and subjectivity, overcoming certain conceptual oppositions between the individual and the collective. To argue that with the general intellect the generic capacities of intelligence, knowledge, and communication come into the centre of the production process is not to argue that human beings, individuals, become interchangeable pseudopods of this generic capacity. What comes to the fore in the contemporary productive process is neither some indifferent generic capacity nor some highly individualized performance, but both at once, it is the transindividual individuation, the intersection between the singular and the common. For Virno this intersection of singular and common proceeds almost unproblematically, eschewing the tension and even anxiety that characterizes Simondon’s understanding of the link between collective and individual individuation.
Virno shares the same fundamental thesis as Stiegler, a thesis that could be broadly characterized as the assertion that contemporary capitalism intersects with the fundamental aspects of individuation and subjectivity in an unprecedented way. For both Stiegler and Virno, what we are dealing with now is the intersection of political economy and anthropogenesis. For Stiegler this intersection is framed through the tertiary retentions, memories, inscribed in signs, tools, and stories that define humanity. As consumer capitalism turned towards these inscriptions, commodifying them through the culture industry, it commodified the defining characteristic of humanity, the inheritance of transindividual individuations. Both Stiegler and Virno understand humanity to be defined by a particular lack of instinctual determination, but while Stiegler stresses the creation and inheritance of a specifically human memory of grammatization, defined by tools and traces, Virno, drawing from Gehlen, argues more forcefully for this indetermination being the defining characteristic of humanity. ‘In terms of morphology, man is, in contrast to all other higher mammals, primarily characterized by deficiencies, which, in an exact, biological sense, qualify as lack of adaptation, lack of specialization, primitive states, and failure to develop, and which are essentially negative features.’ Human beings lack specialization, the instincts and aptitudes that define the animal kingdom, and in their place have a drawn out, perhaps even lifelong practice of learning and forming habits. This lack of determination, the openness to the world, can also be understood as the preindividual basis for individuation. Mankind’s nature, the capacities for language and habits, does not constitute a basis for an individual or collective identity, only the potential for different individuations. The deficiency of instinctual determination is the potential for new habits and languages, for individuation of collectives and groups.
This lack of specialization, of individuation, is the condition for all history, which is why Virno describes language, habits, and fashion as historico-natural: they are natural in that each depend on natural capacities and deficiencies, the biological capacity for language or the deficiencies of instinct that make habits possible, and are historical in that the specific nature of this language or that cultural habit can only be defined by their history. This is true of all history, every specific language, cultural habit, and fashion is a specific actualization of these potentials, a particular compensation for these deficiencies. What defines the present mode of production, however, is that it is not just an actualization of this potential, but the potential itself becoming productive. ‘Human nature returns to the centre of attention not because we are finally dealing with biology rather than history, but because the biological prerogatives of the human animal have required undeniable historical relevance in the contemporary productive process.’ Post-Fordist labour, the labour of the general intellect, does not simply exploit particular habits, particular languages, particular cultural dimensions, but the capacity for acquiring new habits and new languages. The generic capacities of the species, rather than their specific manifestations, are directly put to work.
Virno’s formulation of the increasing centrality of the natural, or historical natural, aspects of transindividuality, the putting to work of the generic capacity rather than specific instantiations of language, habits, and comportments, takes up a different formulation from the Communist Manifesto than the generalized proletarianization developed by Stiegler. In the that text Marx famously argued that with capitalism the various religious and political veils of exploitation are stripped bare, and humankind is confronted with ‘naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.’ Coupled with Marx’s remarks about the destruction of ‘motley feudal ties’ and limited national consciousness and literatures, it is possible to understand Marx as arguing for what Badiou called ‘the desacralization of the social bond.’ The naked nature of capitalist exploitation, the constant need for new markets, new commodities, exposes the contingency of any limited and restricted social relations. Virno extends this idea, arguing that it is not just the artificiality of any social that comes to light, but the ‘congenital potentiality of the human animal’ that takes on a particular actuality. Capital, by ceasesly transforming natural orders and undermining ‘natural superiors,’ exposes the contingency of every social order. This potential, the potential to take on new habits, languages, and comportments, to be individuated differently according to preindividual elements and different transindividuations, was always at work in different historical periods and modes of production, only now it comes directly to light in the flux and contingency of the capitalist production process. While the real abstractions of the wage and commodity form extended the potentially liberartory ideal of abstract humanity, the real abstraction of the general intellect extends a different liberation, one less dependent a generic figure than the possibility of generalized transformative work. There is, however, an ambiguity to this actualization; primarily Virno suggests that the particular manifestation of mankind’s generic capacities as labour power could lead to a dramatic revitization of political action, but there is also the possiblity that the capitalist exploitation of transindividuality will be seen not just as the exposure of this potential but its realization. The stripping away of the various halos, religious and otherwise, could be understood not as the exposure of the contingency of any social order, but as the realization of a the true natural basis of every social order, one based on labor and competition. As Virno states above, the historical becoming of mankind’s biological existence, a biological existence that is nothing other than preindividual capacity to individuate cannot be understood as the ultimate realization of nature itself. The current phase of capitalism is often justified as being nothing other than the pure imposition of natural necessity, of mankind’s fundamental tendency to compete the secret of all human history. It is impossible to aknowledge capitalism tendency to strip bare all other social orders, denaturalizing their various codes and structures, without struggling with its tendency to present itself as the truth of all social systems, as the exploitaiton or competition that has always existed, stripped bare. This is Virno’s explanation of Jamesons’s assertion, ‘It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.’
Stiegler and Virno difference in terms of how they read The Communist Manifesto, the former stressing proletarianization, the later stressing the relentless transformation of social relations, underscores a deeper difference in how they understand the intersection between capitalism and anthropogenesis. Stiegler argued that the intersection was primarily framed through consumption, specifically the consumption of the culture industry in which the media of film, television, and the internet fundamentally transformed the tertiary retentions that formed the basis of transindividuation, while Virno argues that this shift is primarily through production, through the new productive processes of post-Fordism. This shift can be seen in how they situate their analysis with respect to Horkheimer and Adorno’s seminal analysis of the culture industry. Stiegler argues that this analysis needs to be deepened and radicalized, the schema that constituted the generic characters and predictable plots of the culture industry needs to be extended to schematization, the synchronization of thought that constitutes temporal objects. In contrast to this, Virno argues that what defines and delimits Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis of the culture industry is its Fordist dimension, the ‘spiritual production’ of movies, television, and music were subject to the same overarching logic of the assembly line, a logic that stressed mass production and standardization. Much of Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument hinges on this crucial point, that the products of culture in order to be profitable must appeal to the widest possible audience, reducing everyone to that audience. As Adorno writes,
‘The pre-digested quality of the product prevails, justifies itself and establishes itself all the more firmly in so far as it constantly refers to those who cannot digest anything not already pre-digested. It is baby-food: permanent self-reflection based upon the infantile compulsion towards the repetition of needs which it creates in the first place.’
Virno’s argument is not just that this period of standardization has been surpassed, hundreds of channels and millions of webpages replacing the old standardization of ‘A’ and ‘B’ pictures, making possible a culture industry of differentiation rather than standardization, but that the transition to post-Fordism must be understand as fundamental shift in the role of the culture industry. The culture industry does not just produce consumer goods, entertainment and distraction; it is no longer situated at the relative periphery of the economy, placating and disciplining a largely industrial base, but is central. As Virno argues,
The culture industry produces (regenerates, experiments with) communicative procedures, which are then destined to function also as means of production in the more traditional sectors of our contemporary economy. This is the role of the communication industry, once post-Fordism has become fully entrenched: an industry of the means of communication.
For Virno the culture industry must be considered an industry not just in the sense that it continues and perpetuates the ‘proletarianization’ of production into consumption, replacing the basic and fundamental know how with standardized experiences and commodities, but in that it produces the ‘means of production’ of other industries, it produces the capacity to communicate, the knowledge and sensibilities, necessary for production itself. As Marx argued, and Virno repeats, the ‘social individual,’ the knowledge that becomes part of the production process is often produced outside of it, in ‘free time.’ As Marx writes,
Free time—which is both idle time and time for higher activity—has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production process as this different subject. This process is then both discipline, as regards the human being in the process of becoming; and at the same time, practice [Ausübung], experimental science, materially creative and objectifying science, as regards the human being who has become, in whose head exists the accumulated knowledge of society. The consequence of this is that the very activities that were defined in opposition to work, have now been rendered productive. Virno cites Heidegger’s two famous characterizations of ‘inauthentic life,’ ‘idle talk’ and ‘curiosity,’ framing them less in terms of authenticity and inauthenticity than in terms of their understated sociological content. The groundlessness of ‘Idle talk’ and ‘curiosity’ is defined less in terms of their fundamental opposition with authentic existence, than their opposition to production. It is precisely this that has changed with the integration of communication and knowledge in the production process. ‘Idle talk,’ which is nothing less than the capacity of language to constitute its own ground, for speaking about nothing to become its own something, ‘Things are so because one says so’ and curiosity, the search of novelty for novelty sake become productive paradigms in the age of post-Fordist production. It is precisely such groundless, or self-grounding language, and persistent search for novelty that is put to work by contemporary Post-Fordist techniques of marketing and production. As Virno writes, ‘Rather than operating only after the workday, idle talk and curiosity have built their own offices.’ Marketing could not exist without idle talk, and curiosity, without statements becoming their own basis and the ceaseless desire for the new. It is not just the technologies of the culture industry, the screens and computer interfaces that have migrated into the production process, but the sensibilities and capacities: the attitudes and comportments that were defined by their independence from work have become part of it.
What is at stake in the transition to Post-Fordism is a breakdown of not only the division between consumption and production but the much more classical division of human existence into labour, action, and thought. This division, which has its roots in Aristotle, but was famously revived by Hannah Arendt in the middle of the last century, posited labour as instrumental, dominated by the categories of means and ends, and action, determined by the categories of plurality and unpredictability. (Arendt’s distinction was three-part division, a distinction between the cyclical nature of labour, caught up in the biological process of life, the instrumentality of work, and the uncertainty and plurality of action, but Virno focuses on just the distinction between the two). Arendt’s analysis of the distinction is framed in terms of seeing the eventual displacement of action by work (and labour) as instrumentality and a concern for the necessities of existence enters into the public sphere. Virno argues that the opposite has taken place; it is not that action has become work, but work, the productive sphere, has increasingly adopted the characteristics of action. As Virno writes,
I maintain that it is in the world of contemporary labour that we find the ‘being in the presence of others,’ the relationship with the presence of others, the beginning of new processes, and the constitutive familiarity with contingency, the unforeseen, and the possible. I maintain the post-Fordist, the productive labour of surplus, subordinate labour, brings into play the talents and qualifications which, according to a secular tradition, had more to do with political action.
Arendt’s critique, like that of Horkheimer and Adorno remained in a Fordist paradigm, understanding the intersection between work and politics, to be dominated by mass production, instrumentalization, and standardization. Work, homo faber, posed a problem to politics because it risked carrying over the instrumentality, teleology, and necessity into the relam of politics. Arendt’s concern was that politics would become a factory. In contrast to this, the post-Fordist present presents us with a different intersection in which the plurality, contingency, and plurality that defines action has been put to work, becoming the source of production and profit. For Virno the critiques of the attitudes, sensibilities, and ethics of the mid-twentieth century have to be fundamentally revised given the shifts in the contemporary relations of production, shifts that have brought what were once the marginal dimensions of cultural production to the centre.
Despite the fact that Virno reverses Arendt’s central idea regarding work and action, or argues that the history itself has reversed her analysis, he holds onto and in fact extends one of the central terms of her criticism, that the scrambling of the division between work and action also undermines the division between public and private. For Arendt this distinction dissipated in the rise of what she termed ‘the social,’ as what used to be considered private, the economy, increasingly comes to dominate the tasks of the state. Virno, drawing from the idea of transindividuality, understands this transformation differently; it is less a matter of the private entering into politics (as Marx argued the politics of the state have always served class interests) but of recognizing the profound transformations of both public and private, as intellect becomes a productive force. As we saw in the first chapter, transindividuality as a concept cuts across divisions of individual and society, public and private, arguing for their constitutive intertwining. With the rise of the culture industry and the productive nature of the general intellect, this intertwining becomes uncanny: there is something public, common, in every thought, and something private, intimate, in every new product of the culture industry. It might be possible to say, preserving the classical schema of Arendt’s thought, a schema derived from Aristotle, that for Virno the central issue is neither work (poeisis) nor action (praxis) but the becoming public of intellect. However, public takes on a strange, even ambivalent signification here, encompassing both the public as exposure to other, which is to say relational, dimension of the productive process and the public as it is traditionally understood, as a political process. This ambivalence of the term reflects and indicates the ambivalence of the current historical moment. These two points, the reversal of the relation of work to action, and the ambiguity of the dissolve of the public and private are related. The inclusion of communication, interaction, and relation into the productive process, produces an odd reversal. People are more political, more interactive, communicative, in the realm of production, a realm considered private by definition, than they are in the political realm. In the hidden abode of production they interact, talk, and communicate, while in the political sphere they pull a lever to vote, the public sphere of democratic politics is constrained to Fordist technologies of communication and relation. The public can have any candidate they want, so far as it is from one of the established parties. The ambivalence of the public stems from this fundamental contradiction. As Virno writes,
When the fundamental abilities of the human being (thought, language, self-reflection, the capacity for learning) come to the forefront, the situation can take on a disquieting and oppressive appearance; or it can even give way to a non-governmental public sphere, far from the myths and rituals of sovereignty.
As it stands ‘publicness’ exists in the private sphere under the rule of capital, where it is subject to hierarchy and domination of exploitation, and in the turn the ossified official public sphere, the sphere of political decision and action.
Thus, to return to the contradiction Marx glimpsed between exchange and production as two different individuations, it is no longer a matter of the isolated subject of freedom, equality, and Bentham in the sphere of exchange contrasted with the cooperative power of species being in the hidden sphere of production, or of the anarchy of competition against the discipline of production, but between what could be called a public sphere without publicness, a politics governed by mechanical and disciplinary manners of counting votes and amassing responses to surveys, and what Virno calls ‘publicness without a public sphere,’ the economic exploitation of the general intellect. The former refers to the ossified structures of representational democracy, which exclude the very public that they claim to represent. The later is what happens when publicness, the powers of knowledge, communication, and relation are developed, made productive, but denied any political transformative power, subject entirely to the rule of profit. Virno argues that this rule takes the form of hierarchies and subordinations that are increasingly personal, personal because they encompass not just labour power, understood as the capacity to work, but the capacity to communicate and relate. ‘Nobody is as poor as those who see their own relation to the presence of others, that is to say, their own communicative faculty, their own possession of a language, reduced to wage labour.’ There is thus a double alienation, a loss of a world in that this capacity cannot become public, but also a fundamental alienation from the conditions of one’s own communicative activity, an alienation from the preindividual relations that are constitutive of individuation. Virno’s redefinition of alienation as an alienation from the preindividual, or rather from the constitutive relation to the preindividual, that which conditions without being conditioned is the closest his analysis of post-Fordist transindividuality comes to Stiegler’s critique of the proletarianization of subjectivity.
It is possible to understand Virno as radicalizing and extending Marx’s critique of the split between the political sphere and the economy, an extension that perhaps benefits from Antonio Negri’s analysis, which sees the true generative force of social relations to be in the process of production, in living labour. It is not, however, a matter of opposing the egotistical subject of civil society with the cooperative force of living labour, but of recognizing that the very qualities of political action, communication, contingency, and relations, already exist within the post-Fordist labour process. However, it is crucial not to over emphasize the ‘prefigurative’ dimension of this possibility, presenting it as communism residing in the hidden abode of production. Marx’s own analysis is useful here, as much as Marx recognized the cooperative dimension of species being he argued that in capitalism it was something that could only appear as an attribute of capital itself. As Marx writes,
This entire development of the productive forces of socialized labour (in contrast to the more or less isolated labour of individuals), and together with it the uses of science (the general product of social development), in the immediate process of production, takes the form [stellt sich dar] of the productive power of capital. It does not appear as the productive power of labour, or even of that part of it that is identical with capital. And least of all does it appear as the productive power either of the individual workers or of the workers joined together in the process of production.
Virno follows this analysis, extending the term fetishism to encompass precisely this process by which characteristics that belong to the human mind, ‘sociality, capacity for abstraction and communication, etc.,’ are assigned to a thing, such as money. Virno’s redefinition of the fetish is in line with Marx’s observation that the capital appears to be more productive as cooperation and knowledge become a productive force. The idea that cooperation increasingly takes the form of the form of capital itself, that capital becomes the fetish, offers much for thinking about capitalist sociality, a sociality defined by the paradoxes of ‘gregarious isolation.’ However, it still leaves the sense that there is a cooperative kernel underneath the mystical shell, as if it were possible to simply dispense with this appearance of capital to arrive at the cooperative relations within.
As we saw with Marx’s analysis in Capital, as much as it was possible to locate a cooperative dimension, the cooperative possibilities of species activity, in the production process, this cooperative dimension was still subject to exploitation, the effects of which lead to a despotism over the productive process. Virno marks a similar ambivalence over the productive cooperation of the general intellect, but it is framed in different terms consistent with the fragmentation of the factory space and factory discipline in the contemporary production process. As much as the flexibility, communication, and cooperative dimension of post-Fordist labour constitute the possibility for a realization for democratic forms of political action, denied in the formal spheres of representation and participation, Virno argues that the predominate forms that this cooperation takes is cynicism and opportunism. The materialist basis for this cynicism is given in the transformation of the real abstraction, the shift from the abstractions of the equivalent to the abstractions of the contingent and incommensurable. The absence of any common reference, any common rule, between different protocols, paradigms, and forms of knowledge, as workers go from client to client, and job to job, each with their own rules and paradigms, constitutes the materialist basis for an indifference to the very idea of common rules. If cynicism is a subjective response to the incommensurability of different tasks and different jobs, then opportunism is the response to their instability. Post-Fordism has dispensed with the long-term labour contract, and with it the ethical values of deferred gratification, dependability, and commitment. In its place it has created the values of networking, flexibility, and manoeuvrability. Opportunism is a response to this transformation, and to the breakdown of any division between personal relations and economic relations, it is social relations as universal networking. The exploitation of the general intellect does not stand above it, as a division between cooperation and command in the Fordist labour process, but penetrates into its deepest recesses transforming its basic components into opportunism and cynicism. Cynicism is quite simply the tendency to see the current relations, with their differing and changing rules and habits, as all there is. It is the tendency to accept the given and shifting terms of power without worrying about their ground.
In an interview Virno illustrates the ambivalent nature of the social individuality, the simultaneous emergence of the transindividual nature of subjectivity and social relations and its control by commodification, by drawing on several terms from the Marxist tradition. As Virno states,
Reification is what I call the process through which preindividual reality becomes an external thing, a res that appears as a manifest phenomenon, a set of public institutions. By alienation I understand the situation in which the preindividual remains an internal component of the subject but one that the subject is unable to command. The preindividual reality that remains implicit, like a presupposition that conditions us but that we are unable to grasp, is alienated.
Virno is close to Stiegler on two points here. First, in giving a somewhat positive dimension to reification, in which the externalization of the preindividual in the things, structures, and institutions, is the condition of the becoming public of the preindividual. Virno’s revalorization of reification is surprising given its long history in Marx, but is consistent with both his understanding of the general intellect as both technology and subjectivity as well as his understanding of public as a constituent plurality. Although, even this positive dimension of reification is undercut somewhat by Virno’s redefinition of the Marxist concept of fetishism in the same interview, a redefinition that paradoxically encompasses what is general considered to be reification, the transformation of activity into a thing. As Virno states, ‘Fetishism means assigning to something—for example to money—characteristics that belong to the human mind (sociality, capacity for abstraction and communication, etc.)’ Taken together these two redefinitions of Marxist terms through Simondon’s concepts reflect the fundamental ambiguity of exteriorization, or grammatization, in which the inscription or recording of the preindividual in technologies or machines, both reveals and obscures its collective power. Virno, however, further develops the negative dimension of this exteriority be redefining alienation as a ‘preindividual’ that remains implicit but unable to grasp. This is the closest Virno comes to Stiegler in that this redefinition of alienation could be considered another way of representing what the latter calls proletarianization, the machines and commodities which condition the preindividual but cannot be modified or transformed.
In sharp contrast to Stiegler, who sees in the intersection between transindividual individuation and capital only the dissolution of any the constitution of the collective and the individual, Virno sees the constitution of a new collectivity and new individuality, a social individual and multitude, in the contemporary process of production, even if this social individual is currently only a possibility lingering in an abode of production which remains hidden—not by the factory doors but by the fetish of capital and money. To the extent that the dynamic and transformative potential of transindividuality appears, it appears as the power of capital. The fundamental ambivalence of this situation, as simultaneously liberating and oppressive is encapsulated by the role of the public. As Virno writes,
When the fundamental abilities of the human being (thought, language, self-reflection, the capacity for learning) come to the forefront, the situation can take on a disquieting and oppressive appearance; or it can even give way to a non-governmental public sphere, far from the myths and rituals of sovereignty.
What could be called ‘actual existing’ transindividuation, the domination of the productive powers of transindividuality under the rule of capital and postfordist exploitation, is the disquieting and oppressive appearance, but this appearance has to continually be judged against the possibility of a new public, one far from the state or capital.
No comments:
Post a Comment