Seven Red

So, continuing on in our long neglected series on the so-called Italian Ideology, I want to look at Paolo Virno’s discussion of the joke in Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation. Behind Negri, Virno is probably the closest of the old autonomist movement thinkers in terms of his recent publication in English speaking contexts. Several of his early pieces appear, of course, in the Autonomia volume originally published in 1982, but Michael Hardt’s influence in moving contemporary Italian thought into English translation has been massive. Virno co-edited, with Hardt, Radical Thought in Italy, which appeared in 1996, and Virno’s subsequent little volume, A Grammar of the Multitude was at least widely remarked on when it appeared in 2004. Last summer, in addition to Marazzi’s Capital and Language, Semiotext(e) published Multitude: Between…, not to be confused with Hardt and Negri’s Multitude (the third volume of Hardt and Negri’s series, called Commonwealth, is due in October). So, obviously, Virno has been working on this concept of multitude as the form of the political, as well as a set of related concepts also addressed in Negri, like the common and kairos, so he could therefore be said to supplement the more popular work in the Empire line. Indeed, this is precisely how Virno’s work has functioned even among those clearly in tune with the Negri’s arguments (like Ronald Greene, for instance).

I’d suggest, however, that Virno is far more grounded in rhetorical and linguistic theory than Negri, which certainly makes the relative lack of interest in his work among American rhetoricians a little mystifying. The 1990’s-style tendency to hitch American rhetoric’s wagon to the latest European philosopher has been duly squelched of late by the neo-pragmatists, not to mention the monopolistic Burke industry. Stars and stripes forever. That’s probably a good thing, even if the baby often goes out with the eau-de-toilette. But I think Multitude: Between… makes some interesting moves that at least deserve a closer look, that-side-of-the-pond provenance notwithstanding.

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For me, one of the more interesting papers published in The Responsibilities of Rhetoric – the proceedings of the 2008 RSA Conference – is Richard Glejzer and Michael Bernard-Donals’ “Synecdoche as Figure of the Holocaust,” largely because it dovetails with Alan Liu’s recent collection of essays, Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database. Both pieces zoom in on and seek to explain the rhetorical work of the detail in contemporary historical writing, so I think I’ll discuss them together here.

Glejzer and Bernard-Donals are really starting, theoretically, with the problem of figuration in historical writing, building off the work of Hayden White, and his four tropes through which historians “structure” history (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony). At issue for Glejzer and Bernard-Donals is, first, which of these figures dominates Holocaust history, and, second, more expansively, what the dominant figure tells us about the historical event and our understanding of it. Specifically, the authors identify a purportedly metonymic method in Holocaust history writing that has dominated the field “since Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews” (really, the classic in the field, even 50 years after its first publication), and through the various memoirs and diaries and witnessings. The metonymic structure of these histories, the authors contend, proceeds by a detailed recitation of the “parts” that – both singly and through accumulation – points back to a whole as explanation or cause (220); you would presumably understand something of the Holocaust as some kind of substantive agent that produces the parts (the particular detail) as patient of that agent. But Glejzer and Bernard-Donals find something very different in Daniel Mendelsohn’s memoir, The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million. While the memoir would seem, on its surface, to be structured according to the same metonymic logic of historical figuration, it actually, Glejzer and Bernard-Donals argue, operates by synecdoche. If metonymy points back to a whole as cause, synecdoche functions rather as a “part-for-part substitution, in which the associative relation implies a whole rather than expresses it as part of the substitutive relation” (220). It points back to the “hole” rather than the “whole” of the historical event, some essential caesura or excess that, because it is the real – escapes the method of detail, and any method of telling, for that matter.

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So she shows me a copy of Time Out Chicago that features the web site bombchicago, billed as “perhaps the only website dedicated to documenting the local street-art scene.” Er, excuse me. Of course, my readers well know that I don’t document so-called “street art;” I document graffiti. So I guess that’s semi-accurate. The proprietor of the site, operating in full resentment mode, gets all pissed off that the state thought doing business as “Bomb Chicago” was in poor taste, and he says the following:

The graffiti artists that [the site is] following encounter the same attitude. They’re fighting censorship, and we’re documenting their process. In doing that, we became a victim of the same censorship.

I never met a graffiti writer in my life who was “battling censorship,” but then, they didn’t go around calling themselves “street artists” either, so there it is. But she pointed out the funny part of the article:

Last week, we followed up with the DBS, explaining Lee’s situation and asking if it was aware that bomb is a graffiti term. “Until you said what you said, I didn’t know what it was,” said Marilyn, a communications supervisor who didn’t give her last name. She explained that the process of determining whether an assumed name qualifies as offensive is subjective. “The final determination is made by our specialists,” she said. “It’s up to, basically, the office.”

So we asked Marilyn to reconsider Bomb Chicago. She put us on hold, talked for several minutes to her supervisor, Robert Durchholz, then got back on the line: “He doesn’t see any reason it shouldn’t go through,” she reported. “He said it’s not really distasteful.”

So for all Lee’s sniffiness about “censorship,” it turns out that the state bureaucrats really don’t give a flying fuck about “street art,” and figure it’s A-OK if it’s only about, like, bombing and not, you know, bombing. I should note here that any graffiti can be prosecuted as a felony in the State of Illinois. In any case, here are some felonies, since I’m not really “dedicated to documenting the local street art scene.” Harrumph.

NOTEEF fill-in, off Diversey stop, Brown Line, August 2009.

TYPER, XMEN Crew, Off Diversey stop, Brown Line, August 2009.

DEK fill-in, off the BQE, Brooklyn, August 2009.

More on the Brooklyn trip later. For now, just some pics of babygirl killing time while we brunched it up with the famiglia.