I usually hate interview books. The Derrida interview book industry is perhaps the worst offender, but I dislike them in general. I think the last one I really enjoyed was the big version of Foucault Live, which I must have read in the spring of 2000 for the Foucault course I was then taking. Otherwise, I find these interview books just painful and never very interesting in content. But I do have to make an exception for Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri’s In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics, published last month by Minnesota.
As an interview book, I think it’s a winner for three reasons. First, it’s not only interviews. Casarino’s preface – “Surplus Common” – is really an astounding essay in its own right, with really sharp readings of Aristotle and Marx, and about as clear a description/evaluation of the Negrian project as you could ask for. The other two essays are equally interesting, one by Negri on biopolitics and the general intellect, and another by Casarino, a previously published article on Agamben and Negri’s concepts of time and, not surprisingly, kairos (Casarino’s essay from several years ago, “Pornocairology, or the Communist Clinamen of Pornography” should be standard reading in graduate rhetoric surveys, though, of course, it is not.) Second, the book works as an interview book because Casarino is a damned good interviewer; he fights with Negri where he should, he knows the material cold, and he probes incisively to draw out the conceptual system. Negri, for his part, is remarkable as always in his ability to be a nasty bastard and quite generous, noting, at one point, that he and Agamben are best of friends, and vacation together, just before he trashes Agamben’s whole project as proto-capitalist ideology. It’s hilarious. But Negri is also on the ball throughout, and I think there are significant revelations in here, such as a rather detailed account of Negri’s grappling with Gramscianism (Casarino, meanwhile, expresses astonishment, for example, at the success of Laclau and Mouffe’s project among US academics, noting that he experienced it as little more than the kind of “alliance politics pursued by the Italian Communist Party–with largely disastrous results in the end–as (he) was growing up in Italy in the 1970′s” (163), and a fortiori for a version of Stuart Hall, I should think!). Third, Negri has taken such a beating at the hands of various parties and numerous numbskulls over the last few years that it is in some ways refreshing to see him hitting back, as he does often. This was already apparent in The Porcelain Workshop: For a New Grammar of Politics, a series of lectures – primarily meditations on the category of the “decision” – delivered in 2004-2005 and published earlier this year by Semiotext(e), in which you see a fairly angry Negri lashing out and defending his positions fairly closely. The interviews really play up this angle as well.
Apart from these three check marks, In Praise of the Common really works because it takes you through Negri’s positions in a systematic way, no doubt thanks to the formidible learning and graciousness of Casarino. In my fantasy “Rhetoric and Italian Automist Thought” graduate class, this would have to be an early required reading. If the problem of Empire has always been the return of the “enemy” in a system of immanence, In Praise of the Common approaches this question head on, repeating the Spinozan master trope of the two that are One (two modernities, two commons, two democracies, two temporalities, two biopolitics), while seeking to think antagonism (class struggle) and synthesis without dialectics. If that ain’t your bag, fine, but if you want to beat up on Negri for reinserting the “enemy” into immanence, you have to grapple with the arguments he puts forward here. Obviously, Negri’s going to get it from both sides: the hardcore Deleuze peoples are going to reproach him for residual Hegelianism because of his insistence on the category of antagonism, while the liberals and painfully orthodox Marxists will beat him up for abandoning the traditional concept of class, and the organizational capacities it once had (the latter will almost always cloak this critique in a putatively and fairly stupid “empirical” rebuttal, needless to say). For my money, the double beating is why Negri is interesting.
I want to say more about some of the interviews, but I’ll break it up over the next couple of days. I think I’ll also discuss Christian Marazzi’s Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy, which had the unfortunate publishing date of October 2008. I say unfortunate because the book is practically dated as soon as it was published (Marazzi’s first work in translation, it was actually written in and before 2004). Since Marazzi’s book is largely an analysis of the Internet bubble, it looks almost quaint in light of the far more severe crisis of finance capital represented by the recent collapse of the credit markets. At the same time, the analysis holds remarkably well, and provides some interesting theses, even if Marazzi, a trained economist, remains better on the analysis of capital than he does on the analysis of language.
But back to Negri and Casarino. The first interview serves as a needed overview of Negri’s early intellectual development and political activism. I say needed on both counts because some American readers have been rather quick to dismiss both the rigor and political commitments of books like Empire and Multitude; one recent response to these works even suggested that their thesis amounted to calling for oppressed people to “lay back and enjoy it”—really an outrageous ad hominem, but easy enough to publish under the banner of polemics. In Negri’s discussion of his early development, you really get the scope of the scholarship and early accomplishment, even if it doesn’t add all that much to what you would already get in, for example, Steven Wright’s account (Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Italian Autonomist Marxism), or even the detailed introduction and closing essay by the translators of Negri’s classic lectures, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse. It’s still moving, however, to hear Negri discuss the revelation that the Italian factory system was to him when he encountered it (especially in light of his later critiques of “revelation” and epiphany as such, especially when thinking through Benjamin’s work). His discussions of his early activism at the Porto Marghera chemical and gas complexes are really crucial for following the trajectory of Negri’s insistence on tying autonomist thought to production or workerism, an insistence that is critiqued (and not without warrant)—by both Wright and, say, George Katsiaficas (in The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life):
…this was also the time when I basically stopped travelling: all my discoveries and explorations were focused on the factories of Porto Marghera. This was my favorite place back then: Porto Marghera had been built at the end of World War I, but it was in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s that the great chemical plants and oil refineries were built there…there were no union organizations in the area; or, rather, union organizations did exist but were mostly external to the factory—and when they were internal they were very corrupt, that is, they had been put together by the boss so as to fulfill the need of pretending there was some form of dialogue and mediation…these are the years—from 1962-1969—when I stopped writing. The factory was my archive—and it was an exceptional one at that. My research consisted of arriving in front of the factory door at 5:00 am and staying there until 8:00 am handing out leaflets, talking, and getting drunk on grappa with the workers, while surrounded by the thick winter fog and the unbearable oil stench. Then I would go to teach at the university in Padua. And then I would return to porto Marghera at %;00 pm to meet again with the workers so as to write the leaflets we would be handing out the next day. There were around sixty thousand factory workers in that area at the time. (51-52).
Given the at times ridiculous charges thrown at Negri quite flippantly by some American academics (especially of the traditional Marxist variety), I think some of this biographical detail is important, especially for students coming into contact with Negri’s work for the first time through books like Empire and Multitude. Whatever one might think of negri’s intellectual work, this is a guy who really walked the walk – something that grad students and academics purporting to be waging a class struggle from their offices might consider before they invent nonsenses. It should not, of course, stand as some kind of authenticity narrative (and I do think Negri is careful to avoid such silly trump cards), but it might at least forestall easy acceptance of these dumb ad hominem arguments, while also providing context for some of the seemingly stranger moves in Negri’s projects (Is there a fetish for “production?” Why insist on the categories of production and surplus? Why insist on antagonism if you’re going to posit immanence?)
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