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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
Four men in a cell in Rebibbia prison, Rome, awaiting trial on serious charges of subversion. One of them, the political thinker Antonio Negri, spends his days writing. Among his writings are twenty letters addressed to a young friend in France letters in which Negri reflects on his own personal development as a philosopher, theorist and political activist and analyses the events, activities and movements in which he has been involved. The letters recount an existential journey that links a rigorous philosophical education with a powerful political passion, set against the historical backdrop of postwar Italy. Crucially, Negri recalls the pivotal moment in 1978 when the former prime minister of Italy, Aldo Moro, was kidnapped and killed by the Red Brigades, and how the institutions then pinned that killing onto him and his associates. Published here for the first time, these letters offer a unique and invaluable insight into the factors that shaped the thinking of one of the most influential political theorists of our time and they document Negri's role in the development of political movements like Autonomia. They are a vivid testimony to one man's journey through the political upheavals and intellectual traditions of the late 20th century, in the course of which he produced a body of work that has had, and continues to have, a profound impact on radical thought and politics around the world.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Translator’s Preface
Introduction by Timothy S. Murphy
Letter One: The Dry Veneto
Letter Two: The Labour Movement
Letter Three: Souzy
Letter Four:
Admiratio
Letter Five: Jürgen
Letter Six: Turin
Letter Seven: July 1960
Letter Eight: Piazza Statuto
Letter Nine: Autonomy
Letter Ten: New Year’s Eve 1968
Letter Eleven: Golem 1968–70
Letter Twelve:
Civill Warre
Letter Thirteen: Separation
Letter Fourteen: A Leap of Joy
Letter Fifteen: Carnival
Letter Sixteen: 1977 as a Turning Point
Letter Seventeen: Manhattan
Letter Eighteen: Moro
Letter Nineteen: Ferocious Alphabets
Letter Twenty: Renaissance
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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To my friends Lula, Paolo, Gian, Souzy,Jürgen, Raniero, Romano, Mario, Alberto, Italo,Massimo, Sergio, Guido, Francesco,Luciano, Franco, Christian, Yann, Nanni,Félix, Sylvie and so many, many others
Pipeline
Letters from Prison
Antonio Negri
Translated by Ed Emery
polity
Copyright © Antonio Negri 2014
The right of Antonio Negri to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2014 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8176-4
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
The ‘remembrance’ is complementary to the ‘lived experience’. In it is deposited the growing self-alienation of man, who catalogues his past like a dead possession . . . the relic derives from the corpse, the ‘remembrance’ from the dead experience, which is defined euphemistically as ‘lived experience’.
Walter Benjamin
An image is an idea through which the mind considers a thing as being present; however it indicates more the present state of the human body, rather than the nature of the external thing.
Baruch Spinoza
Pygmalion himself would not succeed in making his work believe that it possessed a life, despite all his efforts; it is only when he puts down his sculptor’s chisel and falls to his knees like a poor man that divinity descends upon him.
Franz Rosenzweig
Desire, which arises out of Reason, cannot have excess.
Baruch Spinoza
The dates of these letters (10 October 1981 to 7 April 1982) and the place (a special section of Rebibbia prison) are real. The text contains political and literary references and references to everyday life which are to be understood in this framework and in this time. The existence or nonexistence of references does not change the fact that the genre is one of imagination.
Translator’s Preface
The letters in this book were composed in prison, under trying circumstances. The text is very dense – ‘shorthand’ and ‘baroque’, as Negri himself admits; take for example the phrase lo stuzzichino è giapponese in Letter 19, translated here ‘Like Japanese soldiers from a war long since over.’ I have paraphrased where necessary and have kept explanatory notes to a minimum.
The editorial process of writing this book was somewhat unusual. As Negri explained in an interview that I did with him in 2013, in Rebibbia there were four of them in the cell – Negri, Franco Tommei, and two other comrades (varying according to the vagaries of prisoners being moved between cells). Negri would write the text by hand, to provide the basic manuscript; Tommei would then type the text on a manual typewriter, chapter by chapter; and then it would be sent to the outside world.
Inevitably there were scribal errors – some we have discovered only today, others perhaps will never be discovered – but the book was eventually completed for publication. It emerged wreathed in tobacco smoke. As the author recalls: ‘In the cells we were all of us smokers. We smoked all the time. That was what destroyed my lungs, with the effects that I feel today.’
In accordance with my previous practice, in places where the sense suggests the French contrast between pouvoir and puissance, I have translated potere as ‘Power’ (capitalised) and have generally rendered potenza as potenza, occasionally opting for ‘potentiality’ where that helps the meaning.
Special thanks to Manuela Tecusan (Cambridge) and Tim Murphy (Oklahoma) for help with sourcing citations. Many of the citations were unsourced in the original letters, often taken from books that arrived in Negri’s cell more or less by happenstance. As the author explains: ‘The Hofmannsthal play. Which one was it? Maybe it was Elektra. How do you expect me to remember? This was thirty years ago, and I was in prison, and I don’t have the manuscript. You can tell them that in the preface.’
Cambridge, 5.viii.2014
IntroductionTimothy S. Murphy
In order to understand what value Antonio Negri’s Pipeline has today, the reader needs to understand the significance of the book’s original appearance, its place in his critical development. This book was first published in Italy by Giulio Einaudi in 1983, under the title PipeLine: Lettere da Rebibbia (Pipeline: Letters from Rebibbia). Rebibbia will be explained shortly, but first things first: why ‘Pipeline’? The term appears several times in the text, perhaps most notably in the concluding lines of the fourth letter: ‘There is energy in what I am expressing. But is my writing up to it? Energy – flow – a gas pipeline – an oil pipeline – a pipeline – it is moving forward, but it’s filthy’ (Letter Four, p. 54). But Pipeline is more than an industrial or hydrodynamic metaphor, as the opening lines of the twentieth letter reveal: ‘These conversations that I’m having with myself are elemental, even in the strong sense – rather than having the fragmented rhythm of philosophy, they are more like music in their flowingness. Pipeline’ (Letter Twenty, p. 213). This emergent complexity is no more than what Negri had promised in the second paragraph of the first letter: ‘A real flow. Pipeline’ (Letter One, p. 14). Negri intends his letters to act as a conduit, then, not only between himself and his reader but between individual and collective, between autobiography and art, between philosophy and militancy, between past and future, and between Italy and the world.
Today Negri is well known around the world as a provocative theorist of capitalist globalisation and of the novel forms of resistance that the phenomenon has inspired. His books written in collaboration with Michael Hardt – Empire, Multitude, Commonwealth and Declaration – have been translated into dozens of languages and their concepts and strategies have been taken up, both for prolonged debate and for immediate use, by subversive movements in many nations. At the time these letters were written, in the early eighties, Negri was already prominent and controversial in Italy for his organising activities in workplaces and as a radical political theorist to the left of both the Communist and the Socialist Party. As he explains at the start of the sixth letter, he became actively involved in Italian left politics upon completing his formal education at home and abroad in 1959. As a professor of the philosophy of law at the University of Padua’s Institute for Political Science, he was uniquely well situated to construct links between the students, who became increasingly politically active as the sixties progressed, and the industrial workers of the Veneto, who were losing patience with their political representatives in the left-wing parties. By working with his colleagues to create situations in which those groups could come together, Negri helped to cross-pollinate a counterculture that would be unmatched by any other for size, inventiveness and dedication to practical militancy. These letters tell the story of that counterculture as much as they tell Negri’s own story.
Along with colleagues from the university and comrades from the factories, Negri co-founded the radical group Workers’ Power (Potere Operaio, Potop) in 1969, in the hope of consolidating the many local victories that workers were winning throughout Italy despite opposition from their own unions and from the left parties that claimed to speak for them. Potop openly organised wildcat strikes, work slowdowns, occupations and workers’ seminars in defiance of the unions. At the dawn of the seventies, the Italian radical movements diversified as feminists, unemployed, gays and lesbians, and other subjects ignored by the existing political party structure began to make demands as aggressive as those of the students and factory workers. Their challenges to the exclusionary composition of Workers’ Power led Negri and his comrades to dissolve the group and begin constituting a more open-ended organisation, or rather a network of organisations, which came to be called Workers’ Autonomy (Autonomia Operaia). In most western nations the radical rupture of ‘politics as usual’ that defined 1968 was soon absorbed back into conventional political structures; but in Italy it persisted for another decade, taking on increasingly dramatic and outrageous forms that ranged from the wildly theatrical Metropolitan Indians to the underground cells of the Red Brigades and Armed Proletarian Nuclei. At the height of the movements in 1977–8, millions of Italians of all ages were involved to some degree in organised dissent, and the state was increasingly unable to preserve the kind of order required for capitalist management of the economy. It was a pivotal time of widespread social instability, when small events could have gigantic ramifications. At that moment the Red Brigades kidnapped former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro and, after holding him for weeks and subjecting him to a ‘people’s trial’ for the crime of trying to build an alliance between the centre-right Christian Democratic Party and the Italian Communist Party, murdered him. Their overall aim was to shatter the Italian state’s legitimacy and cause it to collapse, whereupon some version of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ could take charge.1 Unsurprisingly, this did not happen; on the contrary, Moro’s murder heightened public fears of the more chaotic aspects of the radical movements and gave the state the support it needed to finally strike back at them. One of the first such strikes was launched against Negri on 7 April 1979, when he and a number of his colleagues were arrested on charges of involvement in Moro’s kidnapping and murder and of ‘armed insurrection against the powers of the state’ (see Letter Nineteen, p. 204).
Pipeline was written while Negri was incarcerated in Rebibbia Prison, a penal complex consisting of three separate men’s facilities and one women’s facility, which was built in the northeast quarter of Rome in 1972. Negri was held there for several years pending trial, originally on the Moro and armed insurrection charges; by the time this book was written, however, the Moro charges had been dropped and replaced by a continually mutating set of accusations involving terrorism. The sole purpose of these accusations was to allow the Italian state to lock him up for as long as possible before trial. In addition to the crimes listed above, Negri was accused of being the mastermind behind not only Workers’ Power but also the clandestine terrorist organisation of the Red Brigades, with which he had never been involved and which he had regularly criticised and denounced in his writings and speeches over many years. As a result of the many warrants issued in other jurisdictions following his original arrest, he had been held at other prisons too before being brought to Rebibbia: Rovigo (outside Padua), Fossombrone (east of Florence), Palmi (northeast of Messina at the southern tip of Italy) and Trani (on the Adriatic coast in Puglia). Negri describes the different atmospheres of those prisons in the opening paragraphs of the nineteenth letter (p. 204). By mid-1981 his transfers from prison to prison had come to an end and he remained in Rome, incarcerated under terrorism and armed insurrection charges until his release from prison in late June 1983. The release came as a result of his election to the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house in the Italian parliament.
Although Pipeline was published in February 1983, the letters that comprise it were composed between 10 October 1981 and 7 April 1982, during Negri’s third year in custody, as he awaited trial. In his first year of imprisonment he had managed to write his influential study of Spinoza, The Savage Anomaly, despite the constant interruptions of interrogations, preliminary court hearings, meetings with legal counsel, and transfers from one high-security prison to another; indeed at the conclusion to that book’s preface he insists: ‘I do not believe that prison has given a different quality, either better or worse’, to Savage Anomaly than freedom had to his earlier works. He concludes the preface with the hope that ‘the solitude of this damned cell has proved as fertile as the Spinozan solitude of the optical laboratory’, and signs it ‘From the prisons of Rovigo, Rebibbia, Fossombrone, Palmi and Trani: April 7, 1979 to April 7, 1980’.2 Part of the reason why Negri was able to write not only The Savage Anomaly but also many other, shorter texts while imprisoned was the fact that, although confined, he was not wholly isolated in prison. 7 April 1979 marks not only the date of Negri’s arrest but also the start of a vast effort on the part of the Italian state to criminalise the radical movements, including Workers’ Power and Workers’ Autonomy, that had been convulsing the country’s political landscape since the late sixties. This effort began with the arrest of thousands of militants in all parts of Italy – many of whom, like Negri, would be tried collectively only after many lengthy postponements. In a late 1980 interview Negri admitted:
My life in prison isn’t bad. There are about 3,000 comrades currently held in the Special Prisons (for ‘terrorists’). There is therefore a very rich level of political discussion. Our strength, even in prison, is indubitable. So, our conditions of imprisonment are not of the worst. They are without doubt better than those that the common prisoner had to undergo before the influx of comrades into the prisons.3
Conditions in the prisons would soon become worse. During Negri’s second year of incarceration, 1980 to 1981, he continued to write prolifically, as the many essays that make up his 1982 book Macchina tempo: Rompicapi, liberazione, costituzione (Time Machine: New Problems, Liberation, Constitution) demonstrate.4 The strength of the radical comrades within the Italian prison system undergirded his ongoing work, but that strength also led to confrontations with and retribution from the prison authorities. Not long after the interview cited above, Negri and his colleagues got caught up in a prison revolt led by Red Brigades prisoners who were being held in the same unit of Trani Prison. On 28 December 1980, the Red Brigaders took a guard prisoner after wounding him with an improvised knife, and used his keys to release other prisoners and then take other guards hostage. At sunset the next day, while negotiations between the Red Brigaders and the prison governor were breaking down, a military assault squad descended upon Trani in helicopters. Gunfire and grenade explosions announced their entrance. In their rush to retake the prison building, the soldiers made no distinctions between the Red Brigade prisoners, who were the instigators and the only active participants in the revolt, and the other prisoners, like Negri and his Padua colleague Emilio Vesce, who were nonparticipant bystanders. Vesce had two ribs broken and Negri was kicked in the head before both were driven by the soldiers into the arms of a platoon of masked prison guards, who beat them further. Once the prison building had been secured by the military, the guards systematically destroyed the prisoners’ belongings, including their personal letters and defence documents. Negri writes briefly about this revolt in Letter Nineteen (p. 208), but a more detailed account of the event is given in Revolution Retrieved.5
By the middle of his third year of imprisonment, when Negri began to write Pipeline, his earlier confidence in the strength of the militant movements and in their ultimate victory over the state’s forces had begun to weaken as a result of the endless changes in the charges against him, concomitant deferrals of his trial, and ongoing torments and indignities of prison life. (See the opening lines of Letter Ten, p. 107) As he notes in Letter Eighteen, by kidnapping, ‘prosecuting’ and then murdering Moro, the Red Brigades had not really attacked the Italian state, as they claimed; on the contrary, they had strengthened the state – in that Moro’s murder served as a pretext for the state’s criminalisation and suppression of the militant movements that it viewed as the greatest threat to its stability. This should come as no surprise, since the hierarchical structure and vanguardist ideology of the Red Brigades constituted a mirror image of the state’s administrative form and legal logic. So did the sham trial to which the Red Brigades subjected Moro before killing him. The proof of this gift that the Red Brigades gave to the state lay not only in the mass arrests of 7 April 1979 and in the brutal treatment of political prisoners, but also in the passage of legislation extending the maximum period of preventive detention prior to trial from six to eleven years in cases of alleged terrorism and granting leniency to ‘repentant’ terrorists (the pentiti) who implicated others in terrorist acts. By mid-1981, after even more comrades were crammed into the special prisons, Negri knew that he might be facing up to nine more years of incarceration before his trial began; and a deluge of new charges was brought against him on the basis of the claims of pentiti anxious to reduce their own sentences.6 In writing his letters against this backdrop, Negri was trying to set the power of militant desire, both his own and that of his comrades, flowing again, so as to build a pipeline that could serve at least as an affective and conceptual – if not physical or legal – line of flight from the prison’s and the state’s rigid walls, which had closed around all of them.
The letters themselves may seem confusing or even offputting to readers who expect either a concerted legalistic self-defence, complete with exculpatory evidence, or a glimpse of the everyday life of a notorious ‘wicked teacher’ (in Italian cattivo maestro, as Negri and his fellow militant professors were labelled in the Italian press – see his tribute to Raniero Panzieri in Letter Seven). Although he writes movingly of his childhood (Letters One and Two), first love (Letter Three), his wife and children (Letters Six and Ten), his mother’s death (Letter Eleven), and his arrest and revulsion at prison life (Letter Nineteen), his main purpose is not to chronicle the details of his individual experience. The letters do not constitute an autobiography or memoir, at least not a full one. At most they offer a narrative of those experiences, whether intellectual or somatic, individual or collective, that made Negri into the militant theorist he was at that moment. This book is really an attempt at a philosophical definition and defence of militant practice, both his own and that of the radical movements more broadly. It is also an implicit political self-criticism, in the tradition of Georg Lukács’ Defence of History and Class Consciousness.7 As Negri puts it at the start of the first letter, ‘Tell me your name, claim what you are’ (Letter One, p. 13). His method here is not so different from the ‘biographical materialism’ that he deployed in his studies of Descartes and Spinoza, though the tone of this book is quite different from the tone of those earlier ones.8 In the postscript to Letter Fifteen, he acknowledges that
what I’m writing is unnecessarily convoluted. Or maybe convoluted is not the right word: overloaded, rather, with content added to the basic theme – baroque, because it seems that I can’t avoid alternatives, variants and derivations. Bombastic. This redundancy conceals, it does not clarify. Please forgive this limitation of mine – and also its complement, which is that sometimes I am clumsy, irritated, inattentive, late, dreamy, writing in shorthand – and this happens each time that some involuntary memory pushes itself forward in me and brings to the surface that other aspect of life that is my ego, my history, my private things, my memories, my loves, and all that. (Letter Fifteen, pp. 171–2)
The book’s distance from conventional autobiography or memoir becomes even clearer when we examine the author’s note that immediately precedes the first letter. In that note, Negri insists upon the accuracy of the site and dates of the letters’ composition and the actuality of its references to literature, political events and events of everyday life, but he also tells the reader frankly that the book’s genre is imaginative rather than historical. What does he mean by this? First and foremost, he is alerting the reader to the fact that his addressee throughout the book, the young French philosopher and militant David, is a fiction or, more precisely, a composite of the many comrades with whom Negri worked, intimately and passionately, to construct a viable radical political organisation over the course of the sixties and seventies.9 From this fact it follows that the letter form Negri adopts is also part of the fiction, in the sense that these letters were never really sent to anyone – as for example Antonio Gramsci’s and later George Jackson’s prison letters were – but instead are addressed to the book’s general readers, over David’s head as it were.10 The regular recurrence of references to the book’s title further confirms this. Thus, while Negri is implicitly and self-consciously referring to the tradition of earlier prison letters, particularly those of incarcerated radicals like Gramsci and Jackson, his book adopts the documentary mode of that tradition as a formal device that allows him to address an unknown, potentially international readership in familiar terms.
In the self-conscious fictional artifice of this book, as in its unique mixture of artistic, philosophical and political references, we can see one of the earliest substantive flowerings of Negri’s own aesthetic impulse, which has recently given rise to his series of stage dramas, the Trilogy of Resistance11 (to be followed by a Trilogy of Critique and a Trilogy of Love). Negri’s pantheon has always included James Joyce, Bertolt Brecht, Giacomo Leopardi and other poets, playwrights and novelists – along with philosophers like Spinoza and militant thinkers like Machiavelli, Marx and Lenin, all of whom influence his craft in Pipeline (see especially Letters Ten and Fifteen). Even science fiction, in the form of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books, provides Negri with both inspiration and consolation (in Letter Seventeen). This aesthetic impulse will later lead him in surprising directions, some of which are first signalled in these letters. For example, at the beginning of Letter Eighteen Negri pens a tribute, couched in explicitly literary terms, to the man he was accused of murdering:
He, Moro, with incredible skill and an intelligence born of despair, strove to make the whole story even more far-reaching and enriched it with true substance, through his letters during the two months of his captivity. The disclosure of a politician’s humanity, as we know, is a topos of classical tragedy. The pity elicited could be profound. (Letter Eighteen, p. 194)
The first play of Negri’s Trilogy of Critique, still in progress, endeavours to stage Moro’s ‘classical tragedy’, but also to go beyond it in order to honour the prime minister’s daring candour; its title is L’uomo che ride: Critica della politica (The Laughing Man: Critique of Politics).12
Pipeline is the only one of Negri’s more than sixty books to be published by Giulio Einaudi Editore of Turin, which at that time was perhaps the most prestigious publishing house in Italy. Einaudi had published the first edition of Antonio Gramsci’s Letters from Prison in 1947, and went on to become a major left-leaning publisher while remaining independent of both the Italian Communist Party and the Italian Socialist Party.13 Many of the best-known and best-loved names in postwar Italian literature were published by Einaudi, for example Cesare Pavese, Italo Calvino and Giorgio Agamben. According to the back cover of the original edition, Giulio Einaudi himself invited Negri to write Pipeline because he felt that Negri’s story amounted to a ‘central testimony of our time’.14 It is difficult to overstate the significance of this gesture of Einaudi’s at that moment in Negri’s judicial predicament – a moment when Negri and his co-defendants had been thoroughly demonised in the eyes of the Italian public as a result of the mainstream media’s shamefully uncritical parroting of prosecution claims (even the Communist Party-controlled paper L’Unità endorsed those claims). The fledgling independent left media, such as the newspaper Il Manifesto, and the more specialised journals of the academic left had consistently been more supportive of Negri and his comrades, though sometimes only on the basis of their commitment to civil liberties and due process; but their influence was comparatively small. Against this backdrop, Einaudi’s invitation can only have been understood as a gesture of solidarity, since Negri’s writings had never been bestsellers and Pipeline itself is too unusual and demanding in style to appeal to a broad popular audience. Given all this, the publication of Pipeline inaugurated a period, corresponding to the fourth year of Negri’s incarceration, in which prominent figures in Italian cultural life who were not involved with the militant movements expressed public support for the demonised prisoners. For Negri, ultimately the most important (though not unproblematic) of these figures would be Marco Panella, the leader of the small but inventive Radical Party, which would nominate Negri for a seat in the Italian parliament in the 1983 elections. Negri’s election as a deputy for Rome, Milan and Naples forced the state to release him from prison and later allowed him to flee to France when parliament voted to strip him of his immunity from prosecution.15 Soon thereafter he was found guilty of the freshest charges against him and sentenced to 30 years of imprisonment; but the French government, which interpreted his prosecution as political, refused to extradite him in response to Italian requests. He remained in exile for 14 years, during which a series of appeals reduced his sentence to 13 years, before returning to Italy in 1997 to serve out his sentence. All told, Negri served six and a half years of full-time detention plus another three years of half-time house arrest before being released on parole in 2003.
The letters that make up this book are important as a participant’s account of how the radical social movements of the sixties and seventies emerged, fragmented and were ultimately destroyed in Italy, as well as of how the movements’ innovations in theory and practice survived that defeat to influence struggle in the new millennium. Hence their significance is largely retrospective. However, they also have a prospective relevance, although it is much less readily apparent than their historical value. The letters occupy a key position in the evolution of Negri’s later work, which proved so influential, on collective resistance to the new paradigm of capitalist power – that is, on the multitude against Empire. Many of the observations, proposals and themes in these letters constitute the embryos from which later analyses and concepts would grow. The first letter evokes the poor as the fundamental category of future resistance – ‘The poor is the sign of the collective’ (Letter One,p. 23) – just as Hardt and Negri would in Multitude,16 and the third letter links that collective subject to the project of a materialist utopia, defined as ‘the collective desire to go beyond the limit set up by enemies in order to guarantee of their power’ (Letter Three, p.42). The thirteenth and fourteenth letters acknowledge the increasing significance of feminist thought and struggle for Negri’s conception of a subversive subjectivity, which would ultimately lead to the definition of affective, immaterial or cyborg labour in Hardt and Negri’s Labor of Dionysus17 and to the emphasis on the ‘living flesh’ of the multitude in their Multitude.18 Moreover, Negri’s prison experience as a whole made his and Hardt’s extension of Michel Foucault’s analysis of the expanding ‘carceral’ dimension of contemporary biopolitics, as well as their adoption of Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the society of control, frighteningly concrete.19 To put it bluntly, the techniques pioneered by the Italian legislature, judiciary and prison system to suppress the radical movements of the sixties and seventies – techniques that were first tested on Negri and his comrades – are among the clearest and most direct sources for the generalised state of exception from the rule of law that defines Empire’s global rule today.
Despite this firsthand experience with the new forms of repression that now make militancy so risky, Negri’s ultimate assessment of his prison experience is affirmative, indeed hopeful. As he writes near the end of the nineteenth letter:
I was living in prison the first concrete dimensions of a long-term project, the realisation of the new dislocation of proletarian composition. A major effort that nevertheless enabled us, within the continuing struggle, to be participants again, but now transformed, in the resumption of the movement. (Letter Nineteen, p. 211)
And the very last words of the book take this notion a step further: ‘We are in the future – our present reflects some features of that future . . . The future has a relationship of reciprocity with the past – but it is ontologically prior to the past, even though in logical terms it comes after’ (Letter Twenty, pp. 221–2). In other words, the future already exists in the past and in the present, in the form of real tendencies that, although minor and difficult to discern, will grow and intensify to the point where they transform the world. Such was the destiny facing industrial labour in the eighteenth century, colonial emancipation in the nineteenth century, and self-organising social and technical systems in the mid-twentieth century. The art of subversive politics lies in recognising and nurturing those tendencies until they mature, in affirming their difference and all the unanticipated differences to which they will give rise in the fullness of time. This is what Negri describes – but also enacts – in Pipeline: the affirmation of difference, both individual and collective, as the active constitution of new political subjects, and ultimately the invention of a new, fluid social order that will not divide, reduce and conquer the inclusive diversity of the multitude but rather extend and intensify it. This is the future toward which Negri’s pipeline carries us.
Notes
1
. This is Negri’s own interpretation of Red Brigades strategy, for example throughout his pamphlet ‘Domination and Sabotage’, in his
Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy
, trans. T. Murphy, A. Bove, E. Emery and F. Novello, New York: Verso, 2005, especially at pp. 231–4, 257–8, 264–7 and 274–8. As David Moss notes in his
Politics of Left-Wing Violence in Italy 1969–1985
, London: Macmillan, 1989, the Red Brigades’ most specific aims in kidnapping, trying and killing Moro were to demonstrate their own military capacity and to secure their own hegemony over the extra-parliamentary left by increasing state repression against non-clandestine radical movements like Workers’ Autonomy and by encouraging rival clandestine groups to ally themselves with the Red Brigades; see pp. 72, 74, 151–2, 230–1.
2
. Antonio Negri,
The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics
, trans. Michael Hardt, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, p. xxiii (translation modified).
3
. ‘Interview with Toni Negri (1980)’, in Antonio Negri,
Revolution Retrieved: Selected Writings on Marx, Keynes, Capitalist Crisis and New Social Subjects 1967–1983
, trans. Ed Emery and John Merrington, London: Red Notes, 1988, p. 247.
4
. The most substantive and forward-looking piece in
Macchina tempo
, has been translated into English by Matteo Mandarini as ‘The Constitution of Time: The Timepieces of Capital and Communist Liberation’ and published in Antonio Negri,
Time for Revolution
, New York: Continuum, 2003, pp. 19–135.
5
. ‘The Revolt at Trani Prison’, pp. 253–8 in Negri’s
Revolution Retrieved
. Negri describes this experience in a video interview (in Italian) available at
http://youtu.be/zTY1Dow6MzU
. For further multimedia documentation of Negri’s intellectual and political itinerary, see Ed Emery’s photo-archive of Negri’s personal library at
www.flickr.com/photos/105224025@N05/
.
6
. Many of these charges stemmed from claims made by the convicted kidnapper and murderer Carlo Fioroni to the effect that Negri was involved in Fiorini’s own crimes. As a result of his ‘evidence’, Fioroni’s sentence was reduced and the Italian secret service spirited him out of the country. He refused to return for cross-examination during Negri’s original trial, but his pre-trial testimony was admitted into evidence nonetheless. His claims were not officially discredited until 1989, when he finally took the stand during the 7 April appeals process. For a more detailed account of Negri’s trial, including references, see my introduction, ‘Books for Burning’, to Negri’s
Books for Burning
, pp. ix–xxviii.
7
. See Georg Lukács,
A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic
, trans. Esther Leslie, New York: Verso, 2000.
8
. The phrase ‘biographical materialism’ was coined by Matteo Mandarini and Alberto Toscano in their introduction to Antonio Negri,
Political Descartes: Reason, Ideology and the Bourgeois Project
, New York: Verso, 2006, p. 1.
9
. Although the character ‘David’ is a composite, Negri did have a particular reader in mind as he wrote the letters: his friend Yann Moulier Boutang, a French economist who is best known to English-speaking readers for his book
Cognitive Capitalism
, trans. Ed Emery, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012.
10
. Antonio Gramsci,
Letters from Prison
, vols 1–2, ed. Frank Rosengarten, trans. Raymond Rosenthal, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994; George Jackson,
Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson
, New York: Bantam Books, 1970 (with an introduction by Jean Genet).
11
. 9788868269791Antonio Negri,
Trilogy of Resistance
, trans. Timothy S. Murphy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
12
. Although it has not yet been published, Negri’s new play has been staged at the Avignon Festival in France and at the Kotor Art Festival in Montenegro.
13
. Einaudi’s political engagement came to an end in 1994, when Einaudi Editore was acquired by the Mondadori publishing group, a subsidiary of Silvio Berlusconi’s media conglomerate Fininvest.
14
. Antonio Negri,
Pipe-Line: Lettere da Rebibbia
, Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1983.
15
. Antonio Negri’s
Diary of an Escape
, trans. Ed Emery, Cambridge: Polity, 2010, tells the story of the start of his trial, his election and escape to France in fascinating detail.
16
. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire
, New York: Penguin Press, 2004, chapter 2.1.
17
. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,
Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form
, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994, pp. 12–14, 280–1, 309–11.
18
. See Hardt and Negri,
Multitude
, chapter 2.3.
19
. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,
Empire
, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000, pp. 22–7, 195–8 and chapter 3.6 (‘Capitalist Sovereignty, or Administering the Global Society of Control’).
Letter OneThe Dry Veneto
Rebibbia, 10 October 1981
Cher David,
So you have been in Padua. At last you have seen it – that city, which is a fount of every kind of extremist conspiracy and intrigue. Yet for me it has always seemed worthier of the pen of a Stendhal than of a Dostoevsky. Never mind . . . not only the cities, but above all the ways of the world have changed. So much so that dyspeptic small-time public prosecutors can go round inventing chilling tales to hit the headlines. For some reason it fell to me to be the pivotal point in this game, which was being played (and still is) around falsehood and provocation, because the truth was immediately clear and immediately recognised as unacceptable to the raison d’état. The story here is a heavy story and it’s already brought me a great many years of prison; besides, at this point I do not want to pull out of the game. So I understand your question, my young friend: tell me your name. A name that has been sullied by the brutality of the political courts and by the violence of the media. Tell me your name, claim what you are. Sure, David, I want to try. Because I like you. But also because this story has not been painless and, in living it – whether with irony or in despair – I’ve had more than one moment of doubt. Maybe, in explaining things to you, I’ll manage to deal with a few uncertainties about my identity. But where shall I begin? Should I call on memory for assistance? I fear memory. Too often it is empty vanity and replaces the real instead of getting immersed in it. It is ideology; it is self-complacency; and, in this prison I inhabit, it is also the torment of a past that is fixed, downcast, turned against life; it is the act of blackmail of solitude against collective desire. There must be something truer, which enabled me both to become a man and to offer you now this bodily thing that I am, declaring myself a collective being, beyond the sour taste of individuality. In the old days I used to attend Jean Bollack’s lectures: animus – not anima – is what Lucretius called that nucleus of very thin material in quo consilium vitae regimenque locatum est.1 Here we are: neither the pure, vital sensibility nor the memory of its illusions – rather it is the animus that should speak, against and beyond the triviality of memory. As for our names, we find them assigned to us – they come out slowly from a kind of great indifference in which we recognise ourselves to be immersed. Imagination, then and now, breaks this indifference – and it is a hard nucleus of rationality and passion. It constitutes us as what we are: signs of a relationship between past, future, and the many senses of time; and signs of a collective relationship. I find my name only in relation to a history that has been co-lived with me and in which my being has been formed. A good hermeneutics points to what is most internal with the help of what is most external. So it will be this cupiditas that will allow me to tell the story and to set in motion the machine of liberation.
You, David, like many comrades born in this last decade of struggles (and out of its passionate and ruthless critique), are nevertheless deeply puzzled about the ontological compactness to which I refer, and you wonder whether taking it as a starting assumption does not flatten history. That may even be so; for the moment I cannot offer much to counter this puzzlement. I entrust the thesis to history. The canvas is materialist: life is a sacrament, a blend of divinity and reality, and, on this surface, love and violence form social essences and collective identities. A real flow. Pipeline. It is in here that we carve ourselves out. Imagination shows us childhood as a transcendental structure without a subject; the untidiness of memory and the misery of individuality are tempered against this background. We generously seek ourselves within this controverted reality into which we are immersed; it is an astute generosity, à la Lévi-Strauss, that sets us on the hunt, and the ego is the savage. I do not know how to explain this better; it is in the fact of recognising ourselves in a community that we grasp ourselves. It’s a tough act. Did you not learn this in your native Brittany?
The people’s Veneto, where I grew up, is not a soft land – everything was dry. Dry, the frost that clung to the workers’ jackets in the morning, when long queues of bicycles – a huge procession of ants whitened by frost – arrived to assist in the dispersed and primitive accumulation of capital. Dry from the dust that collected on plane trees in the countryside, in the summer heat. That dust was full of pollen in both spring and autumn; it, too, was dry, and always gave me asthma. Dry, the sweet evening air of May – when, after the evening service, we caught fireflies and put them in glasses. Dry, the magnolia leaves – almost wooden by autumn; and when you walked on them they broke with a crack. Recently certain intellectuals have accredited an image of this strong landscape as moist and flaccid. They are bad witnesses. My mother tongue and that of the people were similarly dry and hard. You found Ruzante2 in the priest’s Sunday sermon, and his sing-song dialect did not diminish the power of the words. My Veneto, the popular and peasant Veneto that I knew in the 1940s and 1950s, had not seen the eighteenth-century bourgeois corruption of morals. It was not Venice, it was the mainland. No religious mysticism. The church was everything in this region, which had no metropolis and had not yet experienced the dispersals of the individual and the exaggerated violence of industrial concentration. The church was a mass organisation. Articulated, loving, omnipresent and powerful. A medieval knight. My relationship with it was physical – a relationship in which the exercise of Christian virtues was dry and natural. I didn’t know what torbid meant – neither the melancholy of Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge nor the emotional upheavals of Musil’s young Törless; in the Veneto of my adolescence there was more of Bavaria than of Mitteleuropa. So that’s where I grew up – and there, at about the age of eighteen, I learned the magic words that were to enable me to articulate the indistinctness into which I was immersed and to swim freely in that dry sea.
The first magic word that I learned at that time was ‘witnessing’. The Catholic movement in the late 1940s and early 1950s was experiencing its first crisis of orientation. Only later did I realise the seriousness of this crisis. My friends and I felt its effects: it was, against the pure and simple political restoration that had happened in Rome, an appeal to the notions of militancy and Christian witnessing in the world. I lived this appeal to witnessing not at the political level but at a human and religious level – this was the concluding phase of my adolescence. Rather than being grounded in history, my experience was psychologically and ethically defined. I lived an enveloping and indistinct horizon and that was where I built the beginnings of my desire to know – witnessing was, first and foremost, an act of vitality effected from within the conditions that you experienced, a break, a choice between what oppresses you and what liberates you. (Do you recall, cher David, the Saxon witnessing of Hans Jürgen Krahl? When I read it in the middle of the events of 1968 I recognised in that confession the genesis of my own desire for a breaking.) A witnessing – but of what? The community, its needs, its reality, the tension that we recognised in it, between poverty and the desire for happiness. Of course, it was a vicious circle (‘there is again a generation that wants to be at the crossroads’ – so says Benjamin in the Metaphysics of Youth – ‘but the crossroads is nowhere to be found’).3 And yet it was not a vicious circle when the circle was infused with charity – with a stripping bare of oneself in the love of others, which broke indifference and produced the first projects of solidarity. We filled this word with content and with hope, as an alternative to another word, which was also magic but in some ways frightening: ‘the priesthood’. It was nevertheless an alternative that we understood well – as a single act of free choice – since it was left to us to take one option or the other, in a world where the abundance of ecclesiastical vocations was accompanied by the urgent need for civil agents of clerical politics. But there was a contradiction – namely this: we were not interested in politics, or at least not in the Christian democrat politics that we saw before us – and we knew no other kind; and yet we wanted to make a stand in the world through radical choices of poverty and of charity. It was clear to us that these choices would not be possible for us as priests, in the world where we lived. In those years, five or six of my friends chose the priesthood, despite everything; but they are all far away now, very far away, as missionaries. We did not understand that the choice of poverty was also an immediately anticapitalist one – only in a distant future could that be argued, not here among us. Here we lived secularism like saints, leaving politics to the priests. What a crazy mix-up. In fact, the decision to opt for poverty and charity broke the indistinction of the world, placed determination as the first element of our ethics – without our knowing it, it was historicising our existence. And perhaps, even though we didn’t really understand it, we had, in the life of community, intuited communism before we came to understand and critique capitalism. With boundless generosity we lived as communists, and we were at the same time Christians, Catholics and people of the Veneto.
Often today apologists of the bosses’ world order accuse me of turning religious sentiment against their works: lack of irony, they tell me. But nothing is more ironic than capital’s failure to grasp any of that – religion, youth, and the world. They are bigger than capital. Here’s Benjamin: ‘The movement of awakening among the new youth shows the direction of that infinitely distant point at which we know religion. And movement in general is for us the deepest guarantee of its proper direction.’4 The irony lies entirely here: in the irreducibility of the movement to fixity, of the sacred to capital. However, what ensured that my emotions stayed alive and lasted for the whole of my life was the fact that I was to witness the very rapid maturing of capitalist development in the Veneto, which coincided with the years of my youth. Might one not say, then, that it’s been a lucky theoretical situation, the one in which I lived? When, ironically, I was able to amass, in the span of a single lifetime, material for reflection on the birth, the development, and now the crisis of a morceau of the Zivilisation of capital?
But let’s get back to my teenage years and to those magic words: ‘the social question’. This was a strange object, because it seemed not to involve us directly. There was no ‘social question’ in the Veneto, people said, except one that was reflected, experienced at second hand. The social question meant the South – a species of ‘third world’ that the sudden and rapacious thirst for accumulation (this was the Catholic critique of the Risorgimento) had dragged into our own world, further impoverishing it, plundering it, exploiting it. The social question came to me as a kind of third-worldism. My first real, politically determined intense emotion was for the conditions of the South. I’ll tell you in another letter about when I started to go to the South. For now you need only grasp the significance of these polar opposites: the Veneto and the South – on the one hand, a well-constructed community in which I felt myself to be a participant and a witness; on the other, a world of deprivation and poverty to which I was driven by generosity and a desire for love. Also by a desire to know? Not really. This was, in the first instance, a compassion, an inability to bear the weight of a picture of desperation that threw into crisis one’s solid illusion of living in a well-ordered world. Compassion is a negative passion – and, like any passion, a spontaneous activity of the soul, but one marked negatively by a suffering that is much stronger than one’s ability to react to it. It is a sense of imperfection that becomes a generic sense of responsibility. It also lacked determination, when in fact this is what had to be conquered. To recognise my own name was to be able to give names to things. However, the compassion helped to strengthen the act of witnessing and to disarticulate indistinct participation in the community. The cognitive imaginings that hovered around this emotional upheaval clustered the new image of the South on top of the recent memories of the war: of hunger, death, destruction, bombings, mournings, deaths – ah, what a lovely childhood! So the compassion and its imaginings were taking shape, concretising the image of the poor. The compassion was turning into indignation.
My readings of those years – when, on this crudely formed base, I was beginning to be a Catholic militant – were Mounier, Maritain, Simone Weil, Bernanos . . . A thinking of our time, but it was difficult material – rather esoteric for a young Catholic from the provinces. In Italian there was nothing or next to nothing, apart from a few peeks at Dorso and Gramsci. But what good are books before lived experience, or outside of it? My diffidence was a search for determinations. However, Simone Weil struck me: ‘Time always takes us where we do not want to go. To love time . . .’5 A transition was beckoning – charity wanted to reconnect itself to time, breaking anything that stood in its way. Thus a strongly lived passion prevents the indistinctness of the reference to an organic community from being translated into cognitive indifference and from abandoning itself to the customary practice of ethical and political representations. The fact that we were Christians certainly did not mean that we were Christian democrats! The charity and the history had to react immediately on each other. Many of the stimuli of Veneto culture, far from blocking impatience, pushed one into it. With hard work – and much more than one imagined! – but penetrating into the flesh of the matter and building a destiny. Later, when I tried to consider these things in terms of theory and the sociology of community, I reinforced my conviction that, compared with Tönnies and Max Weber and the rigidity of all dichotomous models, Simmel had best understood the true dynamic of Gemeinschaft [communitarian spirit]. The breaking of it, and also the expression of its wealth, which is otherwise greedily guarded, can only take place within an internal act of vital transcending. This, I felt, was needed in my spiritual development. And, while it is true that with this we are on the terrain of a thinking of separation and in the conceptual world of Judaism, it is no less true that my desire for knowledge was recognising this and was pressing its impatience beyond any limit of permissible restlessness, in the dry and Catholic homeland of my Veneto. Dry – and sometimes one noticed this – to the point of risking sterility – and a sterile mother is a contradictio in adiecto [contradiction between parts of an argument].
The poor, then. Looking for the poor. From now on, perhaps, cher David, we shall find nothing other than infinite transfigurations of the poor, the proletarian, the immigrant, the emigrant, the peasant of the South, the factory worker, the urban proletarian, the socialised worker [operaio sociale], the prisoner, and so on . . . Wanderjahre in search of this subject – years of vagabondage with this subject.
