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The Sensuous Religion of the Mult itude: Artand Abst ract ion in NegriAlberto Toscano

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Third Text, Vol. 23, Issue 4, July, 2009, 369382

Third TextISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online Third Text (2009)http://www.tandf.co.uk/journalsDOI: 10.1080/09528820903007651

The Sensuous Religion ofthe Multitude

Art and Abstraction in Negri

Alberto Toscano

At the same time, we hear so often that the great masses must have a

sensuous religion

. Not just the great masses, the philosopher needs ittoo. Monotheism of reason and of the heart, polytheism of the imagina-tion and of art, this is what we need! Here first I shall speak of an ideawhich, as far as I know, has never before entered anyones mind wemust have a new mythology, this mythology however must stand in theservice of the ideas, it must become a mythology ofreason.

The Oldest System-Programme of German Idealism (17961797), asquoted in Antonio Negri, Fabbriche del soggetto (1987)

Something in Italy is keeping us all alive.Scritti Politti, Skank Bloc Bologna (1978)

The ICA, Tate Britain, the Serpentine Gallery In a phenomenon nowso common as to pass almost unremarked, Antonio Negri and the tradi-tion or school of Italian autonomist or post-workerist Marxism

1

haverecently made their appearance in all of these London venues, eliciting insome the disabused aperu that revolutionary theory has become yetanother domain to be incorporated and digested by an increasinglyomnivorous curatorial practice. A more affirmative (malgr soi) view ofart as a point of transit, rather than a terminus, of political thinking and

practice has been proposed by Peter Osborne, co-organiser of the Artand Immaterial Labour conference at Tate Britain:

With the decline of independent Left political-intellectual cultures, theartworld remains, for all its intellectual foibles, the main place beyondthe institutions of higher education where intellectual and politicalaspects of social and cultural practices can be debated, and where thesedebates can be transformed.

2

It is difficult to gainsay the idea that the presence of Negri in the artworldbears some relation to said decline. Negri himself has irreverently noted

1. For a persuasivequestioning of the idea of acontinuum spanningworkerism, post-workerism and autonomistMarxism see SergioBologna, A Review ofStorming Heaven: ClassComposition and Strugglein Italian AutonomistMarxism

by Steve Wright,

Strategies: Journal ofTheory, Culture & Politics

,16:2, 2003, available athttp://www.generation-online.org/t/stormingheaven.htm.

2. Peter Osborne, What is tobe Done? (Education),Radical Philosophy

141,available at: http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2188&editorial_id=23279.

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that his main piece of writing on art, the letters from December 1988collected in the 1990 volume Arte e Multitudo

, was principally spurredby financial concerns. In exile, without a passport or a proper workpermit, writing on art was also a matter of expediency. Those circum-stances notwithstanding, I think it is worth delving further into these writ-ings of Negri, and their more recent sequels, not just for the angle they

might afford on the metamorphoses of his work, but for the indicationsthey might harbour for an attempt to think through the politicising and

depoliticising potentialities of the recent turn to art by a number ofprominent radical theorists, a turn, one might maliciously and parenthet-ically note, not entirely alien from the much-debated turn to religion. Ifwe do accept that the issue of decline, or even defeat, has something to dowith it, is there a way of approaching the politico-philosophical concernwith art in ways that do not reduce it to a surrogate for politics, a lastrefuge or redoubt for radicals bereft of a horizon of realisation (or, indeed,of remuneration)?

Tell me how you survived the 1980s and Ill tell you who you are.This might be an apt adage for the handful of contemporary radical theo-

rists from the 1960s levy (1950s, in Negris case) who have garneredsuch attention in the last decade from younger generations learning tocope with and contest neoliberalism. If the likes of Negri, or AlainBadiou, or Jacques Rancire attract deserved interest and admirationtoday, it is also because they managed to invent conceptual configura-tions that permitted them to traverse a period of punishing reaction thateither destroyed or co-opted many of their erstwhile comrades. And,though Negri above all has been led to declare that the winter [of reac-tion and counter-revolution] is over,

3

the disparate philosophical

maquis

of the 1980s might still hold some lessons for those of us whostill feel the chill of the neoliberal offensive. In this respect, Arte e Multi-

tudo

, translated into French with the addition of two letters (1999,2001) and a presentation (from 2004), is a fascinating and instructivedocument.

4

In particular, it evinces the way in which the problems of art(in a rather polysemic way, straddling aesthetics, the production ofartworks and artefacts, and even a theory of the productive imagination)represent a testing-ground for a revolutionary political thought whichseeks to reconstitute itself in the midst of a situation that appears, to allintents and purposes, stripped of the traditional platforms for transfor-mative and emancipatory politics, or worse, where the very memory ofstruggle has been scoured from the minds and bodies of a pulverised anddisconnected multitude. Interestingly, Arte e Multitudo remains, togetherwith texts like his Labour of Job and Factories of the Subject,

5

not a

pessimistic book but a book in which the revolutionary imagination issteeped in the realities of suffering and despair, and in this instanceconfronts itself with the prospect of a political annihilation of ontologyitself in the guise of nuclear conflict.

6

Ethics, a term that recurs through-out Negris writing of the 1980s, is perhaps the name for this constitu-tion of hope in the midst of social devastation and political defeat atheme that Negri had already broached in his Political Descartes,

7

whichdramatises the search by a defeated class (the bourgeoisie, in that case)for a theoretical foothold whence action may be taken up again within ahostile world, a world where ones adversaries, for the time being, holdsway.

3.

Linverno finito

is thetitle of a collection ofNegris writings edited byGiuseppe Caccia andpublished by Castelvecchiin 1996.

4. I will be quoting from theFrench edition: Toni Negri,Art et multitude. Neuflettres sur lart

, Paris,Atelier/EPEL, 2005.

5. Antonio Negri, Fabbrichedel soggetto. Profili,protesi, transiti, macchine,paradossi, passaggi,sovversioni, sistemi,potenze: appunti per undispositivo ontologico

,XXI Secolo, Livorno,1987; Il lavoro di Giobbe

,Manifestolibri, Rome,[1990], 2002

6. The chapter ofFabbrichedel soggetto

concernedwith the radicality of this

ontological negation, andthe manner in which itopens up a horizon ofethical and politicalcontingency, is significantlyentitled No Future.

7. Antonio Negri, PoliticalDescartes: Reason,Ideology and the BourgeoisProject

, trans andintroduction MatteoMandarini and AlbertoToscano, London and NewYork, Verso, 2007

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Before immersing ourselves in Arte e Multitudo

, it is pertinent to notethat Negri was already no stranger to the domain of art, and to thelatters imbrications with politics. In one of the letters that make up thebook, addressed to the artist Manfredo Massironi, he alludes to hiscollaboration with the Gruppo N, active in Padua between 1959 and1964, a contributor to the Op Art movement. He speaks of their experi-

ments with the orgiastic Taylorisation of art, and the practice ofmaking art non-mysterious by demonstrating its productive character,freeing it from aesthetic or market-driven mystifications. This decon-struction of art is portrayed as revealing the living, human substance oflabour

.

In his recent Du Retour: Abcdaire Biopolitique

, he reminiscesabout his connections in the 1960s with the IUAV, Venices radicalisedschool of architecture,

8

and about his participation, alongside theCommunist composer Luigi Nono and the painter Emilio Vedova, in theblocking of the Venice Biennale.

9

To get a sense of the occasion, it isworth quoting the mainstream account in an article entitled ViolenceKills Culture, published in Time

on 28 June 1968:

Gone altogether were the champagne glasses, the busy art politicking andthe horde of wealthy patrons who normally flock to the chic pre-openingparties in the palazzos along the Grand Canal. Instead, the opening of the34th Venice Biennale had become a social and artistic shambles. Thisdubious achievement was yet another milestone in this springs overlongmarathon of student rebellion.

Unsurprisingly, given the importance of Venice in Negris political biog-raphy, the Biennale, which the Time

article comically refers to as the artworlds equivalent of the Olympics, also features in Arte e Multitudo.First, with reference to Robert Rauschenbergs exhibition in 1963, iden-tified as a moment when reality could be held fast and, echoing the

Brecht of 1937, turned violently in a demystifying manner against thedominant powers. The Biennale then returns in the letter from 2001, arather sombre if stoically revolutionary text, in which Negri narrates hisastonishment during a visit at such a void of formal invention, such anabsence of the force of beauty and if the beautiful is not form, what isit?.

10

The whole experience is likened to walking through a cemetery,but also linked to a problem and preoccupation arising from Negristhinking of the real subsumption of society under capitalism: How is itpossible that, in a world that has been conquered by absolute imma-nence, artworks can still exist?

11

Though Negri does not tackle it head on, a strand within his ownpolitical universe, the so-called libertarian tendency within autonomism

coming to the fore in the movement of 1977, especially in Bolognawith the journal A/traverso, animated by Franco Berardi (Bifo), andassociated with phenomena like Mao-Dadaism, the metropolitanIndians and free radios could be seen as an openly negative responseto this question. The so-called desiring and creative side of the move-ment was driven by a heady mix of heretical Marxism, Deleuze andGuattari, and a passion for new technologies, articulating criticisms ofthe Leninism ofAutonomia organizzata which Negri would later metab-olise. In the editorials ofA/traverso, for instance, the attention to theexistentially transformative dimension of the movement, its ethico-aesthetic tendency, to cite Guattari, is linked to a dissemination of

8. On the relations betweenIUAV and workerism, seeGail Day, Strategies in

Metropolitan Merz:Manfredo Tafuri andItalian Workerism,Radical Philosophy, 133,2005.

9. Antonio Negri, with AnneDufourmantelle, Negri onNegri

, trans M BDeBevoise, Routledge,London, 2004, p 168

10. Negri, Art et multitude

, opcit, p 7

11. Ibid

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militancy across the social factory. The seemingly a- or anti-political isrecoded as a politicisation of the entire sphere of collective life:

Dissolution is the innovative form of social action Appropriation andliberation of the body, collective transformation of interpersonal rela-tions are the way in which today we reconstruct a project against factory

work, against any order founded on performance and exploitation.

12

Political writing itself becomes infused with aesthetic, even demiurgiccontent; no longer simply the production of the right slogan and thereflection on the correct line, it becomes poetic, or even mythopoietic: Awriting capable of giving body to the tendency, to incarnate the tendencyas desire, to write into collective life the possibility of liberation.

13

Thevision forwarded by this section of the movement was one of autonomyqua secession and sedition, creation of other spaces that would forcesystemic transformations without any dialectic of recognition. As onecan read in an A/traverso

article from 1975:

Capitalism as a system of domination is destined to continue living for avery long historical period. This does not mean that communism ispushed forward in time, farther away: communism lives contemporane-ously, in and against, as the organisation of social forces in liberation, asthe form of their liberation. But it is not communism that resolves prob-lems: it tables with urgency the questions that the system is forced torespond to in order to survive. This power as partisan autonomy, and notas a government over the whole of society, is the power that we shouldexercise.

14

As the 1977 movement bursts onto the scene, with all of its well-knowncontradictions (resistance of the industrial working class and anticipa-

tion of a network society, Leninist revival and libertarian carnival), thevery notion of politics is more and more put into question. Politics, theeditors of A/ raverso

write, in unmistakably Deleuzo-Guattarianlanguage, is reductive, it restores the dictatorship of the Signifier in theface of the desiring web of a-signifying desire.

15

The question that arisesthen is of knowing whether, having broken with the classical schemas ofparty militancy, a strategy of desire is possible, understood as thecomposition of desiring flows in a direction which is that of liberation.

16

This strategy seems to involve a withdrawal from political representa-tion, leaving the machinations of control and the exigencies of manage-ment to a power that becomes almost self-referential, losing its grip onsociety and life. The examples provided of the strategy of desire are

instructive, as they all concern the sensible forms of political action, andmore specifically the transformations within (political) language itself. A/traverso tells of a political assembly where the juxtaposition of reformistsand revolutionaries is broken by a militant who re-enacts the suicide of ayoung proletarian who had been confined to a madhouse; a woman getsup and shouts I sell wallets!, staging her rage at her unemployment;someone else reads out a Surrealist newspaper, only to reveal that he isquoting from LUnit, the PCI daily.

At the time, such a strategic and libidinal aestheticisation of politicswas the object of some famous observations by Umberto Eco, who triedto account for the illegibility of the movements political codes for the

12. A/traverso (Quattro

frammenti), inSettantasette. Larivoluzione che viene, edsSergio Bianchi andLanfranco Caminiti,second edition,DeriveApprodi, Roma,2004, pp 181, 182

13. Ibid, p 182

14. Ibid, p 185

15. Ibid, p 187

16. Ibid

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traditional establishment, both left and right. Eco explicitly links theillegibility of the movement to the illegibility of the avant-gardes inprevious historical moments. But he goes further. The generation thathas burst on the scene in Year 9 (post-1968) has both sublated andrelayed an otherwise exhausted avant-garde culture.

The new generations speak and live in their everyday practice thelanguage (i.e. the multiplicity of languages) of the avant-garde. Highculture strove to identify the trajectories of avant-garde language, lookingfor them where they had lost themselves in dead ends, while the practiceof the subversive manipulation of languages and behaviours had aban-doned limited editions, art galleries, arthouse cinemas and had cut itself apath with the music of the Beatles, the psychedelic images of YellowSubmarine

, the songs of Jannacci, the dialogues of Cochi and Renato, asJohn Cage and Stockhausen were filtered through the fusion of rock andIndian music, and the walls of the city more and more resembled a paint-ing by Cy Twombly There are now more analogies between a song-writers lyrics and Cline, or between a discussion in an assembly ofmarginals and a Beckett drama, than between Beckett and Cline, on the

one hand, and [mainstream artistic and theatrical events] on the other.

17

This also explains why most of the formal and existential innovations ofthe movement of 1977 did not have the artworld as their arena, andwere more likely to be found in the dark exuberance of AndreaPazienzas comics or in the prog-jazz of Area, whose Greek-born leadsinger, Demetrio Stratos, modelled his vocal experimentations on theAntonin Artaud ofTo Have Done with the Judgement of God.

18

Why take this detour, especially as the creative wing of 1977 despiteits frequent reference to recognisably Negrian notions, above all, thetendency was in many respects at odds with Negris political and theo-

retical practice of the late 1970s? In part, because the aesthetic reflectionsthat occupied Negri at the close of the 1980s are difficult to understandwithout the experience of the repression, co-option and dissipation of thetransformative lan crystallised in that tumultuous year. Accordingly,1977 appears as a watershed, ambiguously positioned between thedesperate resistance of forms of sociality that emerged in the period ofindustrial maturity and the first awareness and representation of a trans-formation in a mental direction of working activity and of the overallsocial cycle, sundered between hypermodernist projection and resis-tance against the hypermodern nightmare, to quote Bifo.

19

The year 1977is also viewed, in terms not devoid of the parochial Italo-centric rhetoricthat sometimes afflicts the autonomist left, as the transition-point to a

postmodern phase. Almost as a verification of the workerist thesis of theproductive primacy of proletarian struggle, the counter-revolutionary,anti-political and consumerist desert of the 1980s is understood as theperverted co-option of the very possibilities for cooperation, technolog-ical change, and a new political anthropology of desires and needs thatthe movement of 1977 had anticipated in all its contradictoriness. NegrisArte e Multitudo, alongside other texts of this period, can thus be read asan attempt to recover the constituent energies of 1977 in the midst of aperiod of crushing defeat and of rapid, but seemingly depoliticising,cultural upheaval. I want to consider Negris contribution in terms ofthree axes: periodisation, abstraction and imagination.

17. Umberto Eco, C unaltralingua, litalo-indiano, inNanni Balestrini and Primo

Moroni, Lorda doro.19681977. La grandeondata rivoluzionaria ecreativa, politica edesistenziale

, ed SergioBianchi, Feltrinelli, Milano,1997, p 610

18. See Mauro Trotta, AndreaPazienza o le straordinarieavventure del desiderio, inSettantasette

, op cit, re thelink between the Italian1977 and the Anglo-American punk 1977. AlsoKeir, When Two Sevens

Clash, available at: http://www.nadir.org.uk/punk.html. The movementin Bologna also registeredin post-punk, as evidencedby Scritti Polittis 1978single Skank BlocBologna (with the blocirreverently referencing, asdoes their garbled name,Antonio Gramsci). SeeSimon Reynolds, Rip It Upand Start Again: Postpunk19781984

, Faber &Faber, London, 2005.Negri himself points to the

importance of punk in Artet multitude

: Punk is avery high moment ofhallucinated realistaffirmation. The punkdystopia is the sensation ofa possible catharsis and thecertainty of theimpossibility of itsexecution, p 77.

19. Franco Berardi (Bifo),

Pour en finir avec lejugement de dieu

, inSettantasette

, op cit, p 173

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The periodising drive in Negris work has been the subject of muchcritical attention, being variously faulted for its partiality, abstraction,teleology and one-dimensionality. Some have even regarded it as a formof prophetism a verdict to which we shall return.

20

Negris work isindeed identifiable with a parade of hegemonic figures of antagonisticlabour-power: professional worker, mass worker, social worker, imma-

terial labourer, cognitive worker, multitude (with the last three or evenfour in many ways melding together into the postmodern figure ofantagonism). At its most elementary, the gesture of periodisation, asenacted by Negri, allows him to posit the objective leverage-point in thetendencies of capitalist production for a revolutionary offensive which isirreducible to structural determinations but which must neverthelessalways, axiomatically, strike at the strongest link in the capitalist chain.This periodisation always exceeds the merely sociological or political-economic; its role is not just to capture the tendency, and thus anticipatethe capitalist counter-offensive, but to recompose or even summon forththe very subject it is describing. There is nothing particularly uniquein this mix of social description and political prescription in Negri (in

varying guises it accompanies the whole of Marxism, and revolutionarythought more broadly). Negris specificity lies perhaps in the emphasisthat he openly puts on the mythopoietic character of this operation. ThatNegris approach should be well-suited to the joint periodisation of artand politics witness both Arte e Multitudo and his more recent inter-vention at the Art and Immaterial Labour colloquium is also notmysterious. We could even hazard that the upsurge of new emblematicfigures, which in turn synthesise the mutations of production and thepotentialities of politics, is itself modelled on a particular interpretationof artistic modernism, and even shares with some theories of modernisma certain logic of purification, acceleration and/or extremisation (such

that the contemporary immaterial labourer would be the most unencum-bered manifestation of living labour, its embodied apotheosis). Likewise,Negri maintains a fidelity to the biopolitical theme of the new manthat brought together artistic modernism and revolutionary politics(think of the infamous invocation of the radical transformation of thecoagulated Homo sapiens

in Trotskys Literature and Revolution

).

21

Negris periodisation of the modern correlation of art/labour/politics,which he recognises is nothing if not schematic, is as follows: 18481870, the rise of a workers movement, centred on the professionalworker

and aesthetically dominated by realism

; 18711914, capitalsreaction against increasing contestation intensifying the division oflabour, while workers develop ideologies of self-management, and

impressionism is the dominant aesthetic for the depiction and analysis ofexperience; 19171929, the victory of the Russian Revolution, of thesoviets, heralds a period of expressionist and experimental abstraction,an abstraction which is a representation of and participation in theabstraction of labour

22

; 19291968 sees this abstraction becominganalytic, but also developing into mass art and accompanying theFordist figure of the mass worker; 1968 to the present: art is politicallyopened onto the problems of the social worker

and becomes inseparablefrom a political aesthetics of experience.

23

Despite what might at first appear as a kind of reductivism of rela-tions of (artistic) production to the mode of production, and to the

20. See David Graeberscritical review of the Art

and Immaterial Labourconference, The Sadness ofPost-Workerism, TheCommoner

, April 2008,available at http://www.commoner.org.uk/?p=33

21. Leon Trotsky, Literatureand Revolution

, AnnArbor, University ofMichigan Press, [1924],1960, p 254

22. Negri, Art et multitude

, opcit, p 63

23. It is interesting to note thatperiodisation for Negri isnot just a form of cognitivemapping, but can evenqualify an actual aestheticexperience. Negri notessuch an epiphany ofperiodisation when hedeclares, following hisattendance at aperformance of PinaBausch and a production ofHamlet

by Nekrosius, Thetransition is over, p 16.

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protagonists of the labour-process in particular, it is clear that the princi-ple of correlation here is not that of base/superstructure, but rather stemsfrom an expressive ontology of labour, conceived as a mobile ground inwhich both art and politics find their source. As Negri declares: Art is acollective labour, its matter is an abstract labour.

24

It is labour, and itsform-giving fire, that expresses itself in these correlations of art and poli-

tics. As Negri writes in a more recent text that returns to the thematics(and periodisations) ofArte e Multitudo

, It is in labour that the world isdissolved and reconstructed and possibly the artworld too.

25

In otherwords, it is the ontological valence of art as labour that subtends thevagaries of periodisation, to the extent that art refers us back to thiscreative act that constitutes labour in its originary essence, that artisticwork is the index of mans inexhaustible capacity to turn being intoexcess and to free labour.

26

What is more, inasmuch as this ontologicalcharacter of labour is understood not just as production but as linguisticcommunication and cooperative creativity, art, like labour, is granted anirrepressible political positivity: Art is, so to speak, always democratic its productive mechanism is democratic in the sense that it produces

language, words, colours, sounds that cluster together into communities,into new communities.

27

Thus, it is the positing of a dimension ofcreativity always in excess of the measures of capital and command even when capital tries to capture in distribution what escapes it inproduction which subtends Negris periodisation. This is also whystaggered periodisations that would treat art as a memory or mourningof moments of politicisation have no attraction for Negri. In thisapproach, art is not a special reservoir of autonomy, but a manifestationof an ontology of labour, or even of creativity or life tout court, whichtends toward the indiscernibility between work, political work and theartwork. The thesis of a conflictual coexistence between living labour

and its deadening capture in the mesh of capitalist valorisation is whatleads Negri to try to track the modes through which such labour mightseparate itself, constructing varieties of exodus and red bases of experi-ence and sensation, and also what makes him so impervious to the warn-ings of critical theory against affirmative culture. In more recentwritings, for instance his text on Rem KoolhaassJunkspace, this excessof living over dead labour is explicitly linked to the biopolitical powerof the multitude: All available energies are put to work, society is put towork:Junkspace equals society of work. In this exploited totality, in thisinjunction to labour, there lives an intransitive freedom, irreducible tothe control that seeks to ply it.28

But periodisation is inextricable from a gamble on the present, from

an estimation of the affordances that action may find in the phase or theconjuncture. Negris periodisation is no different, and the key date,unsurprisingly, is 1968. It is at this point that the upsurge of abstractionthat Negri had associated with the period between the Wall Street crashand the events of May switches into something else. As he notes inMetamorphoses, the 19291968 period is one:

in which abstraction and production are intertwined: the abstraction ofthe current mode of production and the representation of possible worlds;the abstraction of the image and the use of the most varied materials; thesimplification of the artistic gesture and the geometric destructuring of the

24. Negri, Art et multitude, opcit, p 57

25. Antonio Negri,Metamorphoses, transAlberto Toscano, RadicalPhilosophy 149, MayJune2008, p 21

26. Negri, Art et multitude, opcit, pp 69-70. Though art isoften described by Negri interms of excess, it is in turnexceeded by the

ontological dimension ofpower: Our power isgreater than our capacityto express ourselves, p 13.


28. Antonio Negri,Presentazione diJunkspace di RemKoolhaas, in Dallafabbrica alla metropolis:Saggi politici, Datanews,Rome, 2008, p 220

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real, and so on and so forth. Picasso and Klee, Duchamp and Malevich,Beuys and Fontana, Rauschenberg and Christo: we recognise in themartists sharing the same creative experience. A new subject and an abstractobject: a subject capable of demystifying the fetishised destiny imposed bycapital.

But this period, which Negri had defined as analytic just as analyticwas the practice of the Gruppo N which he himself described as aTaylorisation of art is terminated by the events of 68, which in turngive rise to the kind of post-Leninist molecular avant-garde embodiedand celebrated by Bifo and A/traverso. According to Negri, it is with1968 that a whole new set of questions opens up for contemporary art:How does the event arise? How can passion and the desire for transfor-mation develop here and now? How is the revolution configured? Howcan man be remade? How can the abstract become subject? What worlddoes man desire and how does he desire it? What are the forms of lifetaken by this extreme gesture of transformation?29 One might note,however, that in the Italian case given the consuming draw of often

political militancy and of clashes with the state the biunivocal correla-tion between the artistic and the political suggested by Negris periodisa-tion does not entirely materialise, and that it is only really with 1977that an aestheticisation of politics and the everyday, as well as a diffuseexperimentalism in youth and mass culture, really comes to the fore. It isdifficult to know if contemporary art has much of a role to play.

Just as Negri split the period of abstraction into expressionist andanalytic variants, with 1929 as the watershed, so too we might think heproceeds to a similar internal periodisation of a post-1968 period, withan all-consuming politicisation taking centre-stage until the mid-1970s,the surging forth of the last avant-garde, to cite Eco, in and around1977, and the metabolisation and corruption of this moment in thebenighted 1980s and what Negris letters refer to as this tired epoch. Itis this last moment that I want to consider in more depth. For it is inglancing back at the period which followed the counter-revolutionaryoffensive of 1979 (a year bringing together the Volcker shock andNegris own incarceration at the height of the Italian states repressiveonslaught)30 that Negris letters of the late 1980s affirm the pertinence ofthe category of the postmodern a term, it should be noted, which Negriinsists on adopting even now, when its discursive fortunes have consider-ably waned.

For Negri, the postmodern which is explicitly coded as global is amodernity that has detached itself from the progressive teleologies and

functionalism of modernisation (though he will try to re-infuse it withthe temporality of the event, it also seems to represent a spatialisation ofexperience, an annihilation of revolutionary time by capitalist space).But this abstract second nature31 is to be assumed: its world of artificeand surfaces is the only real. It is here though in considerably moretentative tones than in the later, more triumphant works that the leit-motiv of the disappearance of the outside, of an inexorable immanence isbroached. As Negri puts it: I subscribe to the postmodern to the extentthat I think its experience as the truth of abstraction, the recognition ofabstraction as a condition of experience.32 There is no alternative fromthe world, only an alternative in the world. The ontologisation of the

29. Negri, [Metamorphoses],op cit, p 22

30. The origins of the debtcrisis of the 1980s may betraced back to and throughthe lurching efforts of theworlds governments tocope with the economicinstabilities of the 1970s

[including the] monetarycontraction in the UnitedStates (the Volcker Shock)that brought a sharp rise inworld interest rates and asustained appreciation ofthe dollar. Paul Volckerwas the head of the USFederal Reserve from 1979to 1987.


32. Ibid, p 34

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postmodern, the overturning of Baudrillardian hyper-reality into a fieldof struggle and transformation that may still be fundamentally schema-tised through the Trontian lens of a primacy of working-class resistanceand autonomy this is Negris programme following the defeat andcounter-revolution of the 1980s, and in many respects the clue to hisfurther trajectory, including in Empire. But postmodern abstraction is

first of all experienced as a desert and a defeat, as a a gigantic spectacleof absolute indifference,33 and it is this dimension that explains Negrisinterest in artistic labour and experimentation as resources for the recon-stitution of a revolutionary terrain in the midst of defeat, to allow for thedeepening of our soul in the abstract.34 But it is a deepening to be delin-eated in the harsh light of reaction, in full awareness of the defeat of thered decade as a period that Negri tellingly describes as a hyperrealistdelirium, an American surrealism: even more, life and bodies could berecreated, reinvented. Resistance had become alternative. The worldbelonged to us.35 But the dead calm of the 1980s is the bearer of aform of abstraction where every collective antagonistic subject [has]definitively disappeared, to be replaced by the commodity abstraction

alone, by the tautological dominion of the market that great circula-tory machine which produces the nothing of subjectivity.36 It is themidst of this rout, which for Negri seems to affect being itself, thatrevolutionary thinking needs to install itself, scouring the seeminglymeaningless surfaces of capitalism for elements that might allow for arecomposition of antagonistic class politics:

The postmodern is therefore the market. We take the postmodern forwhat it is a destiny of dejection and the postmodern as its ownabstract and strong limit the only world that is possible today Aworld of ghosts, but a true world. The difference between reactionariesand revolutionaries consists in this: the first deny the massive ontological

emptiness of the world, while the second affirm it.37

How then is one to confront the derealisation that marks the 1980s,gathering enough strength to reinvent the very possibility of reinvention,now that the world emphatically seems notto belong to us (or indeedwhen the us itself has been disseminated, atomised, pulverised)? It is herethat Negris reflections dramatise a kind of postmodern passion in anopenly Christian sense. The language itself is unmistakable: We have tolive and suffer the defeat of the truth, of our truth.38 And further: Hereis an authentic Christian moment in our existence: to be capable of aradical break with our reality, of an abandonment and absence that putus once again in contact with the other, with the abandoned friend, with

the now dissipated real to accept the abstraction of the world, toendure its coldness, the desert of the passions.39 The postmodern, and itsseemingly de-ontologising thrust, is to be accepted as a true abstractionof the real, but in order to then reconstitute the real on this desert ofexperience itself. Periodisation is always marked by decisions of disconti-nuity, but here in particular Negri wishes to signal a caesura with thesuccession of periods. There is no longer reconstruction but onlyconstitution in this ateleological, disorienting space. The main challengefor a resurgent constituent power is this: to take on the seemingly nihilis-tic, meaningless abstraction of postmodernity, the disjunction of signand meaning, the loss of any measure of value, and turn it into something

33. Ibid, p 45

34. Ibid, p 37

35. Ibid, p 36

36. Ibid, p 44

37. Ibid, p 48

38. Ibid, p 37

39. Ibid, p 38

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other than a counter-revolutionary passage to powerlessness.40 (It isinteresting here that in Arte e Multitudo Negri praises the early Baudril-lard of the catastrophe of signs and the collapse of value, wishing tomaintain his subversive charge and forestall the turn to paralysing calmand implosion in the French theorists work of the 1980s.) But if abstrac-tion the real abstraction of capitalism is the horizon of postmoder-

nity, what kind of foothold can there be for revolutionary action? AsNegri puts it: How can we construct, or even think the event, on thisabstract terrain which is the only one we frequent?41

To paraphrase Nietzsches notes on European nihilism, when itcomes to the thematic of abstraction, it seems that Negris design is totransmute a passive into an active postmodernism. Despite the denial ofteleology, however, there is a clear operational direction to his proposal,even a method: Reality is shown in its abstraction, then criticallyemptied of meaning, and finally reconstructed according to lines ofsemantic reorientation.42 This passage is from Negris letter to NanniBalestrini, a crucial figure for the melding of the postwar Italian avant-garde and the heretical Marxism heralded by Negri (see in particular

Balestrinis Vogliamo Tutto and Blackout, potent collages of politicalantagonism, or his collaboration with Nono, Contrappunto dialetticoalla mente, followed by Nonos own Non consumiamo Marx, meaninglet us not consume/use up Marx). Writing to Balestrini, Negri praisesthe nouveau roman as a realism of the abstract.43 The quandary of artin the postmodern would thus lie for Negri in the invention of anunprecedented realism, a non-representational realism, capable of reart-iculating the present into something other than a system of global indif-ference. There are echoes here of one of Louis Althussers mostintriguing texts, the short essay on Luigi Cremonini which investigatesthe passage from abstract painting to painting the real abstract, that is

real relations which qua relations are necessarily abstract.44

Abstractionis no longer an operation but the very element in which politics andlabour operate: The abstract is our nature, the abstract is the quality ofour labour, the abstract is the only community in which we exist.45

And it is here that, despite the cautions about the impossibility ofreconstruction in postmodernity, Negri acknowledges the political inspi-ration that may be drawn from the history of abstract art. In this respect,Arte e Multitudo contains a crucial declaration, which formulates ahermeneutics of art as a privileged domain for thinking through thepoliticisation of labour, the passage from cooperation to communism:

I love art from the moment it made itself abstract ever since, in abstrac-

tion, it showed a new quality of being, the participation of the singulari-ties of labour in a single ensemble, which is precisely an abstractensemble. Art has always anticipated the determinations of valorisation:it has therefore become abstract by following a real development,creating a new world through abstraction. In order to be an ontologicalexperience, art does not need a concrete being. With the invention of theabstract, nature, the world, have been entirely replaced by art. Themodern is this abstraction, this participation of the labour of eachsingularity and its interchangeability; an abstract community.46

Crucially, abstract labour, which Marx had qualified in terms ofits commensurability and homogeneity, socially necessary labour as

40. Ibid, p 42

41. Ibid, p 88

42. Ibid, p 77

43. Ibid, p 74

44. Louis Althusser,Cremonini, paintre delabstrait, in crits

philosophiques etpolitiques. Tome II, Stock/IMEC, Paris, p 596


46. Ibid, p 33. The modernhere is not simplyjuxtaposed or antecedentto the postmodern,inasmuch as the latter is, asalready noted, the modernthat has detached itselffrom modernisation.

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calculated in exchange-value,47 is transubstantiated into the bearer ofsingularities that are living but not necessarily concrete (since, in thisabstract second nature, use-value seems to have become obsolescent).Abstract art (a term whose precise extension in Negris account is diffi-cult to pin down) would thus allow us a way into thinking the politicalconstitution of a community stripped of natural determinants, a

monstrous community, to use a term very dear to Negri, which is bornin the midst of a fully socialised world, the world without an outside ofreal subsumption.48

Singularity is the pivotal notion here. The overcoming or neutralisa-tion of the postmodern understood as the meaningless hegemony of themarket depends on the possibility of passing from an indifferentabstraction to a singular abstraction. In the letter addressed to GiorgioAgamben, Negri insists on the possibility of thinking the escape fromthis hegemony, no longer in the guise of the limit, or of the sublime, butin terms of the passage from the ideal to the singular. Here Negri seemsto revive a Schellingian philosophy of art, as the ontological singularityof art is envisaged in terms of a Platonic idea that constructs itself and

exhibits, through its extension into matter, an exemplar. But, as he goeson to explain, this exemplar is irreducible to the idea, because it devel-ops the singular. Art is irreducible to mediation Art is both thecreation and reproduction of the singular absolute.49

There would be much to say about these dense and somewhat perplex-ing passages. What I want to underscore is the significance, which is alsoevident in Negris more explicitly political writings, of this passage fromideality to singularity, this transfiguration of abstraction which displacesit from the domain of commensurability, homogeneity and calculabilitytowards the idea of a composition or community of singularities, acommonality of differences devoid of a common measure. It is on these

grounds that Negri declares that art is the anti-market to the extent thatit opposes the multitude of singularity to uniqueness reduced to a price.50

In a manner that is not really spelled out by Arte e Multitudo, art wouldthus hint towards the possibility ofanother abstraction: Abstract paint-ing is a parable for the ever-renewed pursuit of being, the void andpower Art is the hieroglyph of power [puissance].51 As Negris workhas developed over the two decades after his original letters on art, thisemphasis on the composition of singularities into an abstract community,ie a multitude, has become ever more insistent.

While the motif of a communism that would not be founded on anormative or organic commensuration of its components is a potent one and shared, at this baseline level, by thinkers as distant as Badiou,

Jacques Derrida or Jean-Luc Nancy what remains opaque is, if not thedefinition, then at least the function or physiognomy of singularity asthe crux of this discourse. The aversion to sundry political naturalismsand normative humanisms is not mysterious, and bears a noble anddistinguished pedigree, but how is this concept of singularity not eitherto regenerate an inevitably mystical limit or smuggle in a politicalanthropology of the individual? If nature and mediation are to beequally eschewed, what is the ontological consistency of this paradoxicalnotion of singularity whose very definition or specification would ipsofacto dissipate it? And what criterion, if any, can demarcate true, affir-mative and potent singularities from their simulation and circulation by

47. Karl Marx, Capital,Volume I, trans BenFowkes, Penguin, London,1976, p 992

48. On the monstruous in, oras, art, see Antonio Negri,Art and Culture in the Ageof Empire and the Time ofthe Multitudes, trans MaxHenninger, SubStance 112,36: 1, 2007, pp 4855.


50. Ibid, p 55. Or why art isformally as open as a trueand radical democracy.

51. Ibid, p 54

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the market? Just as Horkheimer and Adorno spoke of pseudo-individu-ality, is there not a proliferation of pseudo-singularities now, even if weaccept the obsolescence of the culture industry and the passage to cogni-tive capitalism?

But perhaps the idea of another abstraction and of the role that art,broadly construed, plays for Negri is best understood in terms of another

dimension of his work of the 1980s: the concern with ethics. Like hisfriend and comrade Guattari, in Arte e Multitudo Negri is trying topresent us with an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, albeit one which wouldserve as the prelude for a renascent revolutionary politics. Or ratherethics is the name for the very activity of recomposing the basis for a radi-cal transformative politics. The faculty linking ethics to politics by way ofaesthetics is imagination a concept that bears the traces, in Negriswork, of Heideggers reading of Kant. In the midst of the panorama ofpostmodern indifference that Negri paints, where counter-revolutionarycapitalism is like an arid desert criss-crossed by rocky ranges, we moveon these planes looking for impossible ruptures. Imagination is thepower that traverses the seeming void of market abstraction in order to

determine an event of rupture.52 Imagination is what manages to turnthe meaningless of capitalism into something monstrous, a cosmicpalpitation.53 What is striking about these texts is that, though theynever really abandon the methods of tendency and class compositionwhich innervate Negris mature work, they display in such a stark andextreme manner the seeming chasm between the inanity of the market, onthe one hand, and the unlikely upsurge of an antagonistic alternative onthe other. At times, as in the letter to Agamben, this is put starkly: thelightning-flash of liberation, writes Negri, is not given dialectically, butmystically.54

This non-dialectical attempt of the imagination to conjure the event

and break the spell of global indifference, making contact with the mate-riality of the true,55 pervades Negris letters, and anticipates the formu-lations of books like Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudo. Another text fromthe 1980s, Fabbriche del soggetto, further excavates this question ofethics, revealing the importance of the inaugural and revolutionaryinsights of German idealism for the Negri of this period. In the midst ofan epoch where the only available meaning is reduced to a kind of emptytautology, where the vanishing of measure also heralds the dissipation ofrevolutionary energies, Negri turns to the Oldest System programme ofGerman Idealism, decreeing that the only way out of the seemingly ines-capable horizon of a terminal defeat lies in the attempt to identify whattoday could be a new mythology of reason, of freedom, a transcendental

aesthetic that would not be trapped in the nets of an extorted media-tion.56 Once again, ethics, understood as the practice of communismhere and now (communism comes first, writes Negri, it is not theoutcome of a transition), is articulated as the response to a postmodernitywhich is depicted as a nihilist evacuation of meaning in the market-drivencirculation of signs: Indifference is the tendency. The more this worlddevelops, the more it matures and perfects itself, the more it becomesindifferent. In an experience that intermingles the globality of produc-tion, the senselessness of communication and the absolute contingency ofaction, in which nuclear warfare or MAD (Mutually Assured Destruc-tion) has made possible the destruction of being itself, the constitution

52. Ibid, p 49

53. Ibid, p 51

54. Ibid, p 52

55. Ibid, p 53

56. Negri, Fabbriche delsoggetto, op cit, p 31

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period, are unique in displaying the peculiar relationship of politics toart in periods of reflux or defeat. Negris emphasis on ethics and themythology of reason, on the need to fashion a sensuous religion for apeople to come, does not just reveal an important dimension of histhinking whose prophetic or performative element has been oftennoted but rarely examined it allows us, in a period that is perhaps

more akin to Negris winter years than he would wish to countenance,to think through the very ambivalence that haunts the notion of anabstract community: at once the promise of a politics hauteur ducapital, and the menace that collective agency will remain fettered tothose forms of abstraction that capital subsumes.

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Art Negri