SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism

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Introduction “Workerism” (operaismo) was a current of Italian Marxism that emerged during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Associated with journals such as Quaderni rossi [Red Notes] and Classe operaia [Working Class], workerist theorists such as Mario Tronti, Sergio Bologna, and Antonio Negri developed a reading of Marx that emphasized the autonomy of labor vis-à-vis capitalist exploitation and state power, thereby departing significantly from the state-centered and reformist policies of the Italian Communist Party (Partito comunista italiano, PCI). The theoretical investigations of the workerists were rooted in an intense practical engagement with the labor struggles that shook Italy during the period of post-1945 industrialization. Many of these struggles, such as the wildcat strikes and labor-police clashes that took place in Turin during the “Hot Autumn” (Autunno caldo) of 1969, were characterized by a high degree of self-organization on the part of workers; they were frequently conducted independently of and against the policies of the PCI and the trade unions.1 On the basis of these struggles, the workerists developed a strong interest in what they termed “class composition.” The concept of class composition addresses both the “technical” organization of the working class within the capitalist mode of production and the forms of “political” subjectivity that emerge within the working class. A central hypothesis of the workerist approach is that, given a certain level of capitalist development, transformations in political composition precede and determine transformations in technical composition.2 This means that the labor struggles accompanying the emergence of a new political subject force entrepreneurs to implement processes of economic restructuring. In the workerist interpretation, such economic restructuring constitutes an attempt to contain the revolutionary transformations that capitalist development produces and depends on, even as these transformations continually call into question capitalism’s material foundations, private ownership of the means of production, and entrepreneurial command over alienated labor. The Italian labor struggles of the 1950s and 1960s occurred in the context of an accelerated transition to a Fordist economy. The workerists took Fordism to be a coincidence of three economic phenomena: Taylorism, or the “scientific” organization of the production process in accordance

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with the principles of “time and motion management” and the massive recruitment of unskilled labor; Fordism in the narrow sense, or a form of consumption planning that uses comparatively high wages to ensure a rise in purchasing power within the working class; and Keynesianism, the ensemble of macro-economic instruments (welfare, state investment) that the nation-state uses to avert economic crises and contain labor unrest. The accelerated transition to Fordism that occurred during the early years of the post-1945 Italian republic also involved a dramatic increase in internal migration, with many young proletarians abandoning the rural south in order to work on the assembly lines of corporations such as FIAT, in the north. By refusing to identify with northern Italy’s political and economic organizations—the PCI, the trade unions—and by engaging in ferocious struggles characterized by absenteeism, sabotage, wildcat strikes, and riots, the new generation of workers prompted the workerists to call out a new labor subject, the Fordist “mass worker” [operaio massa], displacing the traditional subject of skilled labor, the “craft worker” [operaio professionale].3 The struggles of the 1960s corresponded to what the workerists termed the “strategy of refusal” [strategia del rifiuto]—that is, the generalized rejection of Fordist factory labor and of the forms of contractual negotiation and political representation associated with it.4 By the late 1970s, these struggles had led corporations such as FIAT to introduce new, post-Fordist production techniques, in particular the implementation of microelectronic systems and automated production cycles that reduced entrepreneurial dependence on labor. 5 This development, also linked to the outbreak of economic recession in the wake of the oil crisis, reached its climax with the mass layoffs announced by FIAT in 1980. In the meantime, student struggles and the emergence of both a highly combative feminist movement and new, strongly politicized youth cultures had shifted the terrain of struggle away from the factory. The new political subject, which Antonio Negri termed the “socialized worker” [operaio sociale] had made a dramatic entry onto the political scene with the wave of university occupations and riots that occurred in numerous Italian cities in 1977.6 The 1970s were also the years when many factory-based communist organizations such as Potere operaio [Workers’ Power] dissolved, yielding to the much more diffuse ensemble of local movements known as Autonomia operaia [Workers’ Autonomy]. The superation of Fordism and the emergence of a new, post-Fordist political subject is the focus of “post-workerist” [postoperaista] theories, to which the translations in this issue offer an introduction. The authors

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translated—Christian Marazzi, Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Antonio Negri, and Antonella Corsani—all either participated directly in the struggles of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s or take the theoretical legacy of those struggles as their starting point. Many of them were constrained to flee Italy following the state crackdown associated with the so-called “7 April” trials of 1979. France was the country of choice for most of the Italian refugees; a number of the authors we have translated still reside there today. In France, these authors engaged extensively with the post-structuralist philosophy of thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, crafting a new set of theoretical tools adequate to the transformations of contemporary capitalism. The Fordism to which workerist analyses were devoted was essentially Italian Fordism. Post-Fordism, the economic regime that emerges when the political and economic institutions of Fordism go into crisis, is by definition a global phenomenon. The crisis of Fordist factory labor leads not just to a rise in financial speculation, but also to capital export, the recruitment of cheap labor abroad, and an increased entrepreneurial reliance on flexible and globalized networks of production and distribution. In formerly Fordist societies such as Italy, this leads to a dramatic expansion of the tertiary sector and of the forms of “precarity” [precarietà] associated with it: forms of flexible, part-time work and “self-employment” claim an increasingly central role in the cycle of capitalist valorization, leading to significant transformations in the bureaucratic and legislative apparatus of the nation-state and, more generally, in the capacity of state institutions to intervene effectively in the economy. “Empire” is the name that Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt have given to the ensemble of transnational regulatory mechanisms that emerges from these transformations. While Hardt and Negri’s theory of Empire has attracted considerable attention in the Anglophone world, many of the post-workerist analyses on which this theory builds remain unknown there. In particular, postworkerist analyses of the emergent forms of “immaterial labor” have not received the attention they deserve. In much the same way, Hardt and Negri’s analysis of the collective subject that labors and struggles under Empire’s regime of exploitation—the multitude—needs to be studied in the context of other analyses of labor’s recent transformations, as formulated by post-workerist theorists such as Christian Marazzi, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Antonella Corsani. The translations in this issue outline a number of such alternative analyses. Antonella Corsani’s

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contribution, written specifically for this issue of SubStance, interprets recent post-feminist thought in order to question many of the presuppositions concerning the concept of the multitude. Perhaps the most interesting feature of the essays translated herein is their genuinely transnational and transdisciplinary character. The desire to innovate the political reference points of the Left leads these thinkers from feminist theory to economics, from Deleuze and Guattari to Andy Grove. In the work of Christian Marazzi, for instance, quotes from one of capitalism’s new tycoons are integrated in a critical framework marked by the European tradition of labor struggles, resulting in a powerful political and cultural displacement. The ability to reconfigure concepts and discursive strategies developed in closed contexts is absolutely crucial to the current situation. In today’s transnational reality, we must be able to grasp the different ways of thinking and living that derive from the various poles of economic development, philosophical investigation, and political struggle. Obviously, the ultimate goal of the theorists translated here is not the dialectical integration of the many discourses they cite. Rather, they offer a way of overcoming our often limited perspective on the various agents struggling on today’s political scene. Commonplaces about globalization and our increasingly vivid perception of a “shrinking” world acquire a new depth, both as conceptual references and as inspiration for more effective forms of political engagement. It should be remembered that the work of the writers we have translated arises from their close engagement with a number of specific social and political struggles taking place in Europe and elsewhere today. Perhaps the most important of them is the struggle for the introduction of a guaranteed or basic income delinked from wage labor—a struggle that can be traced back to workerist groups such as Potere operaio, and which is today being broadly discussed in journals associated with postworkerism, such as DeriveApprodi (Rome) and Multitudes (Paris), as well as being promoted practically by groups such as Agir contre le chomage! [Take action against unemployment] (France) and various sectors of contemporary Italy’s autonomist left. We believe there is an experiential dimension to the trajectories of these thinkers that could serve as a model of persistence and hope to the “immaterial workers” of academia and of political activism: having lived, worked and fought in different countries, chased either by police mandates or by intellectual curiosity—and sometimes by both—these thinkers remind us that there is a potential for freedom and emancipation even in

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the most painful and violent processes of displacement. They also remind us that thought is a cooperative process, and that political initiatives are events that can be fostered by textual and personal encounters that are sometimes contingent, but often actively desired. It is in this spirit that we present these texts7 to an Anglophone audience, confident that they will contribute to the birth of still new ways of thinking and practicing political intervention in contexts unforeseen both to their authors and to us. Giuseppina Mecchia and Max Henninger Notes 1. The best English-language account of workerism is Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 2002). See also Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2000) 64-77 and Robert Lumley, States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978 (New York and London: Verso, 1990) 167-270. In Italian, see Guido Borio, Francesca Pozzi, and Gigi Roggero (eds.), Futuro anteriore: dai “Quaderni rossi” ai movimenti globali: ricchezze e limiti dell’operaismo italiano (Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2002.) 2. The classic formulation of this hypothesis if Mario Tronti’s essay “Lenin in Inghilterra” [“Lenin in England”], reprinted in Mario Tronti, Operai e capitale (Turin: Einaudi, 1966) [Workers and Capital] 89-95. 3. Nanni Balestrini, a writer associated with the workerist organization Potere operaio [Workers’ Power] during the 1970s, has offered a striking literary portrait of the 1960s mass worker in his novel Vogliamo tutto (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1971) [We Want Everything]. 4. See Tronti 1966 (34-52). 5. On re-structuring at FIAT, see Marco Revelli, Lavorare in Fiat (Milan: Garzanti, 1989) [Working at Fiat]. 6. See Lumley 1990. 7. All texts are translated with permission from the authors and the copyright holders.

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The Authors

Franco Berardi (Bifo) was an important protagonist of Italy’s social protest movements during the 1970s. He was involved in forms of media activism such as those associated with Bologna’s independent radio statio Radio Alice and the journal A/Traverso. A former collaborator of the US journal Semiotext[e], he currently works on themes such as cognitive capitalism and cyberpunk. He is the author of La fabbrica dell’infelicità: new economy e movimento del cognitariato. Antonella Corsani is an economist who has participated, with Maurizio Lazzarato and Antonio Negri, in sociological research on forms of “immaterial labor” in contemporary Paris. She is the author of L’età del capitalismo cognitivo and one of the editors of the journal Multitudes. Maurizio Lazzarato is Paris-based sociologist and philosopher. He has published in the fields of aesthetics and political theory. Much of his work is devoted to the transition from the economic paradigm of industrial labor to that of immaterial labor. His works include Lavoro immateriale, Videofilosofia and Le rivoluzioni del capitalismo. Christian Marazzi has taught at the State University of New York and the Universities of Lausanne and Geneva. His publications examine the economic and socio-political implications of the transition from a Fordist to a post-Fordist economy. His books include Il posto dei calzini and E il denaro va. Antonio Negri was imprisoned on political charges from 1979 to 1983 and from 1997 to 2003. He has published widely in the fields of political theory and philosophy. He is the co-author, with Michael Hardt, of the international bestseller Empire. Paolo Virno was an editor of the Italian journal Metropoli during the 1970s. He has worked as an editor for the communist daily il manifesto and has published mainly in the fields of philosophy and political theory. His works include Convenzione e materialismo, Mondanità, and Parole con parole. He is currently an editor of the journal Luogho comune.

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A Post-Workerist Bibliography

1. Selected Works by the Authors Berardi, Franco (Bifo). Contro il lavoro. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1970. ——. Finalmente il cielo è caduto sulla terra: proletariato giovanile e movimenti di liberazione. Milan: Squilibri Edizioni, 1978. ——. Lavoro zero. Rome: Castelvecchi, 1994. ——. Neuromagna: lavoro cognitivo e infoproduttivo. Rome: Castelvecchi, 1995. ——. Exit: il nostro contributo all’estinzione della civiltà. Genoa: Costa & Nolan, 1997. ——. La fabbrica dell’infelicità. Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2001. Corsani, Antonella. L’età del capitalismo cognitivo. Verona: ombre corte, 2002. Corsani, Antonella; Maurizio Lazzarato; and Antonio Negri. Le bassin du travail immateriel (B.T.I.) dans la metropole parisienne. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996. Lazzarato, Maurizio. Videofilosofia: la percezione del tempo nel postfordismo. Rome: manifestolibri, 1996. ——. Lavoro immateriale: forme di vita e produzione di soggettività. Verona: ombre corte, 1997. ——. Le rivoluzioni del capitalismo. Soveria Manelli: Rubbettino, 2004. Marazzi, Christian. Il posto dei calzini: la svolta linguistica dell’economia e i suoi effetti sulla politica. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1999. ——. E il denaro va: esodo e rivoluzione dei mercati finanziari. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1998. Negri, Antonio. La forma-stato. Per la critica dell’economia politica della Costituzione. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1977. ——. Marx oltre Marx. Quaderno di lavoro sui Grundrisse. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979. ——. L’anomalia selvaggia. Saggio su potere e potenza in Baruch Spinoza. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981. ——. Il potere costituente. Saggio sulle alternative del moderno. Milan: SugarCo, 1992. Virno, Paolo. Convenzione e materialismo: l’unicità senza aurora. Rome: Theoria, 1986. ——. Mondanità. L’idea di ‘mondo’ tra esperienza e sfera pubblica. Rome: Manifestolibri, 1994. ——. Parole con parole: potere e limiti del linguaggio. Rome: Donzelli, 1995. ——. Il ricordo del presente: saggio sul tempo storico. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1999. ——. Esercizi di esodo. Verona: ombre corte, 2001.

2. Further Reading in English Berardi, Franco (Bifo). Anatomy of Autonomy. In: Semiotext(e) III, n. 3 (1980), 148-71. Cleaver, Harry. Reading Capital Politically. London: AK Press, 2000. Hardt, Michael; and Paolo Virno (eds.). Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Lumley, Robert. States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978. New York and London: Verso, 1990. Wright, Steve. Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism. London: Pluto Press, 2002.

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Introduction to

Christian Marazzi’s “Rules for The Incommensurable” This is the second chapter of the book Il posto dei calzini. La svolta linguistica dell’economia e i suoi effetti nella politica [The Place for the Socks: The Linguistic Turn of the Economy and its Effects on Politics], first published in Switzerland by Casagrande Editore (1994) and later in Italy by Bollati Boringhieri (1999). The book is a small, early classic of “immaterial labor” theories, and it is in fact quite inexplicable that such an important reflection should still not be available in English. Not only has this work been quoted by Negri and Hardt in Empire, but it continues to be referenced by a large number of scholars working in the field of “cognitive capitalism.” Christian Marazzi, who is also active on the European social and political scene, particularly in the ongoing struggle for an unconditional universal income, is a professor of political economy at the Scuola Universitaria della Svizzera in Lugano, Switzerland. Following Il posto dei calzini, he has published two other books, E il denaro va. Esodo e rivoluzione dei mercati finanziari (Bellinzona: Casagrande, 1998) [And the Money Goes. Exodus and revolution of the Financial Markets] and Capitale e linguaggio. Dalla new economy all’economia di Guerra (Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2002) [Capital and Language. From the New Economy to the War Economy]. Neither of these later books has yet been translated. In the following essay, Marazzi argues that traditional economical notions and indicators are inadequate for fully comprehending the change undergone by the process of production during the last decades of capitalist development. Marazzi considers the recession of the early 1990s as the first crisis clearly attributable to the economics of the “postFordist” mode of production. The nature both of the objects produced and of the worker who produces them has been transformed: capitalism is increasingly involved in the production of social relations, and the worker participates in production primarily as a social subject, independently from his actual “working hours” or even his salaried performance. In this respect, Marazzi finds that work has been “feminized” by cognitive capitalism because, much like the domestic labor represented in this essay by doing laundry, it involves forms of knowledge and communication not reducible to classical economic notions of valorization or the simple law of supply and demand. For Marazzi, these changes in the actual functioning of our economy have to be accompanied by a renewal of political references and goals: 10

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capitalist exploitation of the new forms of labor can only be fought if we fully understand how the socio-political field of struggle is now configured and what the new power relations in it are. Giuseppina Mecchia, translator

Rules for the Incommensurable Christian Marazzi 1. The Fair of Meanings In the years between the second half of the 1970s and the explosion of the recession of 1989-1991 (United States) and 1991-1994 (Europe and Japan), the gradual emergence of post-Fordism generated a growing “existential malaise,” a climate of pervasive insecurity, a social and political disorientation whose explanation exceeds the conjunctural data.1 This climate of uncertainty, the “no future” widely anticipated by some youth movements of the 1970s, can be attributed to several factors: mass unemployment; the pauperization and occupational instability of everincreasing sectors of the population; the awareness that investments were creating less occupation and that in absolute numbers they were in fact reducing it; problems related to the aging of the population and the financial difficulties these problems were beginning to cause. But it is only in the years of the recession that what had previously remained latent emerged in its full gravity and complexity. The recession of the early 1990s simply tore away the “veil of ignorance” that allowed us to postpone addressing the new socio-economic paradigm politically. Before analyzing the roots of this “crisis of meaning” and its most immediate political implications, we need to consider the reasons for the time lag between the processes of social transformation, the emerging awareness of the mechanisms behind these processes, and the crisis of the political forms intended to govern the transformation. First we should ask ourselves: What are the times of diffusion proper to a new productive paradigm such as today’s new “universal instrument,” the computer (or “language machine”)? Today the computer corresponds to what the electrical motor was a century ago, and the steam engine before that. In response to a question about the times of diffusion proper to the new information technologies, Andrew S. Grove, founder and CEO of Intel corporation, explained in an interview to Business Week that the 11 SubStance #112, Vol. 36, no. 1, 2007

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experience of innovation is different from that of immigration. A Hungarian immigrant who escaped from his country during the 1956 revolution, Grove arrived in the United States at the beginning of the 1960s. He went on to become one of the famous Silicon Valley pioneers. According to him, the difference between innovation and immigration resides in the fact that immigration is a break, a radical separation between a before and an after, while technological transformation is an experience that is lived minute by minute in everyday life. The latter transition is gradual: at a certain point we find ourselves holding in our hands an electric razor or toothbrush. We actually register the experience of the new “universal machine” when it has already become part of our everyday life, when it has already entered our homes and our children’s gadgets.2 .Leaving one’s own country, as in the biblical exodus, is a different experience because it implies laceration and suffering, and thus the awareness of what is happening in one’s life. When we leave, we always think we will come back one day to embrace our friends and family, to see the colors, hear the sounds and smell the air of the country where we were born. If we can’t go back, memory will do all it can to preserve what we have left behind: There are two types of Hungarian immigrants of my age: the people who were constantly bitching about America because they couldn’t find the things they left behind in Hungary, and the people who accepted what was available here as a kind of moral equivalent of what was left behind. Once you got into that mode, you went with the flow and did quite well. The others were still bitching that “they don’t have sideways cafés in New York.” This is a little like that.3

The “universal machine” affirms itself gradually, minute by minute. When the crisis explodes, revealing to everyone the epochal nature of the transformation, it’s already “too late.” We can’t go back; either we go with the flow or we keep resenting our time. Either we try to extract the “moral equivalent” of a previous time, or we poison our lives with resentment, appealing to ever-fading memories. The new does not erase the past, but only that which makes the past a kind of ballast, a dead weight preventing us from facing the future with intelligence and with the capacity for producing new affect and new political struggles. During this transition, the long time periods necessary for the diffusion of the new “universal machine” clash with the shortness of the average life span. As in the biblical flight from Egypt, we hurriedly take our most precious belongings so that we will be able to “wander” in the new world without getting lost. Normally, these are the things that we can

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hide at the border. And the thing easiest to import “clandestinely” into the new world is friendship, the “bridge over the abyss” that allows the wanderer to cross unknown territories—the same friendship that Deleuze and Guattari conceptualized before parting forever.4 On the basis of such considerations, the following remarks by Andy Grove seem less surprising: One of the most dramatic applications of computer technology is airline reservation systems. The reason it’s so dramatic is that you bridge time and place to reserve a seat on a flight that is at a different time and a different place, while sitting at the counter. It’s a communication application.5

What is surprising here is not only the concrete example, which is the most banal and familiar of things, especially when compared to sophisticated discourses about artificial intelligence, but also the reference to a “fourth dimension” which radically transforms even the revolutionary notion of the space-time relation introduced in the twentieth century. Subjectively, we live the daily experience of processes that are revolutionizing our way of viewing things, our categories of thought, our scientific theories, but this subjective and simple experience, which slowly shapes our perception of time and space, clashes with political languages that were created in a different era, and which are emptied of any reference to what we experience in our daily lives. Political discourse’s delayed reaction to the post-Fordist transformation can also be explained with regard to what has happened in the world of scientific research. Academic circles are becoming increasingly closed and restricted, more and more specialized and protective. More generally, the post-Fordist transformation has seen an increase in disciplinary specialization – a multiplication of research fields whose origin is to be found in the obsession of having to measure and quantify everything. Scientific research’s endemic tendency to distinguish between what can be rigorously demonstrated and what can only be discussed ends up opening a rift between two equally important aspects of the discourse on society, “allowing those who dream of the white smock of the ‘scientist’ to avoid discussing the themes that are most difficult and urgent in the social sphere,” in the words of economist Giacomo Becattini. During the post-Fordist transformation, quantitative scientific research, particularly in the economic field, led to a social de-responsabilization of economists. This contributed further to the weakening of the critical autonomy of citizens, who were faced with a proliferation of prêt-à-porter ideologies that would

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have been far more pertinent in the discourse about sports (“success at all costs”) than in the critique of our existence. One could develop an analysis of the insufficiencies intrinsic to the various scientific disciplines, and in particular of the technicalization of disciplinary languages. We will limit ourselves to quoting Fraser’s admonition, pronounced over fifty years ago: “When the phenomena of economic life change, the meanings of the words that we use to describe them change too.” We could add that scientific thought’s “diaspora,” its retreat from the most obvious social changes into a quantitative analysis intended to avoid the interrogation of society’s general development, is symptomatic of the scientist’s fear of losing credibility in the eyes of politicians. In many cases, this has fostered various forms of servile careerism. What is more, Nietzsche has explained very clearly how the will to power is at work in quantitative research; the latter “deprives the world of its most frightening aspects. The fear of the incalculable as the secret instinct of science.” Methodologically, the scientific research of the last two decades has adopted a “strategy of deferral.” By isolating and rigidifying different disciplines and professions, research has organized itself in such a way that it can defer to other disciplines whatever threatens the internal coherence of its own field of inquiry. One deferral at a time, research has denied itself the very possibility of examining change. In fact, “change” has become the object of a research discipline, aggravating the fragmentation of knowledge by one more compartment of specialized discourse. The mechanism by which the analysis of change is delegated to psychology, sociology, or even technology (if not simply to televised debates) has emptied scientific research of every dialectical concept, without which we are unable to understand anything at all. Some have described our current situation as a “crisis of meaning”— an incapacity to elaborate and propose to all members of society a system of references (ideas, norms, values, ideals) that makes it possible to give to one’s existence a stable and coherent meaning, to develop an identity, to communicate with others, to participate in the construction—real or imaginary—of a livable world. This state of affairs is not a consequence of our society being characterized by a radical absence of meaning. The opposite is true: we live in a genuine “fair of meanings” where each of us can “freely” appropriate the images, symbols and myths that s/he prefers. What we lack is a “symbolic order” capable of structuring and unifying the scattered fragments of our lives. This lack of meaning, intended as the absence of a “symbolic order,” is clearly the culmination point of the historical development of capital

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and its vocation to uproot and decode everything. The economy, which has never been more global, annihilates ancient rituals and ceremonies, strips nation states of their power, and disaggregates the nuclear family. Races too are disappearing, “drowning” in processes of immaterial production where the colors and smells of every agent can be reproduced artificially. We thought capitalism would create the conditions for perfect happiness by destroying every sense of belonging, by the nomadism of the rootless individual that results from the “deterritorialization” intrinsic to the development of the global economy. Now we have reached the apex of globalization and capitalist “deterritorialization,” and everything is returning: the Family, the nation state, religious fundamentalism. Everything is returning—but in a perverted, reactionary, conservative way, as the philosopher predicted. At the very time when the “absence of meaning” brings within our reach an era in which human beings finally seem able to speak to one another, by virtue of free access to communication, we are witnessing the return of the idea of “race” and of every myth of origin and belonging. The potential liberty of the “transparent society” turns into its opposite: a racist intolerance that defends the borders of its homeland. The only thing that matters is the myth, the symbol, the semblance of an historical origin capable of dominating chaos with hatred. At this point, the suspicion arises that those who present the quest for a new “symbolic order,” a new “social model,” or a “new utopia” as a humanist denunciation of the emptiness brought about by capitalist development are actually constructing their argument on the wrong premises. It’s not a matter of contesting the noble spirit of those searching for alternatives to the chaos overwhelming us, but rather of avoiding a situation in which illusions are nourished with further illusions, in which the constant “need for meaning” is met with formulas more likely to aggravate our condition than to improve it. Before defining the rules needed to prevent the current deregulation from leading into generalized war, it is necessary, therefore, to think about the “places” where rules are born and constructed. In what follows, this will be done by analyzing the “rule” implicit in the (constitutional) principle of the equality of the sexes.

2. The Place for the Socks The debate over domestic labor, or over the reproductive labor “historically” performed by women, furnishes insights essential to the search for rules and for the measuring unit that defines these rules. These

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insights are necessary for confronting the deregulation that rages unchecked in the age of post-Fordism. There is a controversy between those who consider domestic work economically productive and demand its remuneration (“wages for housework”) and those who define domestic labor as a form of “labor for oneself” indispensable for the preservation of the private sphere. Those who take the second view demand a generalized reduction of wage labor (“work less so all can work”) and a cooperative approach to housework involving men and women alike. The controversy between these two positions is only apparently “old.” It is in fact highly relevant to our time. The critics of the wages for housework model contend that this proposal involves the risk of excluding women from the economic sphere while perpetuating the obligation of men to work full-time. These critics (such as André Gorz) also hold that if we really want to consider the family an autonomous and indivisible unit, we need to establish a perfect reciprocity between male and female domestic activities. “Personal services” would then have to be withdrawn from the logic of wage labor and transformed into an opportunity for reclaiming “ownership of ourselves” (or control over the private sphere). This would involve overcoming the sexual division of labor typical of capitalism (a division that implies the double burden of waged and domestic labor for women). Those are the terms of the theoretical and political debate. It would seem that this way of considering the issue misses several key points. As it happens, domestic and reproductive work has taken the form of wage labor for quite some time, at least tendentially—but it has done so in a way that reproduces class division and exploitation among women. During the past decades, many reproductive activities formerly performed within the family have become services available on the market: food preparation; laundry; house cleaning; care for children, elderly people, the disabled, and the ill. The market for services that involve caring for people, a very intensive kind of labor, has expanded, creating the need for an army of female workers that is increasingly composed of women belonging to “ethnic minorities” or to immigrant groups whose members are “prepared” to accept lower pay. The “salarization” of domestic labor-labor performed by “household aides” within the home and by service workers outside it—has altered neither the sexual nor the racial division of labor, but has created a hierarchy within domestic labor itself. On one side of the division, one finds middleclass women (mainly white); on the other, women who often belong to other ethnic groups and who have little bargaining power.

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This development seems to confirm Gorz’s hypothesis, according to which we need to reduce the sphere of waged reproductive work (“neoservile” and poorly paid personal services) in order to re-establish equality not just between men and women but also among women. But to stop here is to leave the argument incomplete, analytically insufficient and, most of all, politically weak. Ethnological studies have shown how difficult it is to achieve a sexual equality defined in purely juridical terms, without consideration of the real, subjective dynamics at play within the fabric of conjugal life and the relations of partnership. Jean-Claude Kauffmann, a French sociologist specializing in the study of family and everyday life, writes that “the core of the resistance to gender equality is to be found in the family, in the home, in the most elementary domestic practices.”6 Detailed analysis of domestic work reveals that there is a difference in the intensity of the work performed by men and women even when labor time and the level of technological development are the same. According to Taylor’s theory of “scientific management,” an intensification of labor has occurred when a greater quantity of goods is produced in the same time, with the same technology, and by the same number of male and female workers. The increased productivity results from an acceleration of the rhythm of work, achieved by the elimination of the workday’s “pores” (that is, of “dead” production time). Countless examples could be invoked to illustrate this concept. One is that of the pair of socks. For a man, the socks are in their proper place when a woman doesn’t think so at all. She ends up putting them in the place she considers to be the right one. In by-passing the verbal stage and simply putting the socks back “where they belong,” the woman creates a new habit that modifies the initial positions of the two partners. She reproduces and aggravates sexual division. Field research shows that, when their partner is away, only 65 percent of men take care of their laundry, compared to 90 percent of women. Similarly, only 44 percent of men iron their clothes, compared to 87 percent of women. The reason lies in the specific function played by clothing in the relationship between the sexes: clothing is a pivotal “tool” in feminine seduction. Technology, represented by the washing machine (constant capital), is certainly helping men to appropriate some domestic activities, but men still refuse to establish an excessively intimate relationship with their laundry, and don’t respect it very much. Men have invented washing machines, but clearly this invention has not been sufficient for developing a relation of quantitative reciprocity between men and women.

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Women’s notion of the “proper place for the socks” has a long history. An infinity of sexual and social classifications are preserved in the housewife’s simple gesture. The accumulation of countless silent gestures traversing the entire gamut of domestic labor forces us to speak with great caution of sexual reciprocity and the reconstruction of the private sphere through the equitable distribution of housework. Even within a juridical and economic framework premised on sexual equality, the exploitation of women by men is reproduced. The issue has political implications beyond the strictly domestic sphere—implications concerning the question of measure. No jurist and no economist will ever be able to adequately define the measuring unit by which to equitably quantify male-female parity, except in an a posteriori manner. Even with equal rights and working schedules, different histories and sensibilities recreate hierarchies and forms even when their juridical form is considered to have been overcome. The “place for the socks,” the silent gesture that condenses thousands of years of sexual role-distribution, poses the question of rights on a qualitatively new level. Amartya Sen is right to point out that, in conventional economic theory, “individuals and firms are visible,” but families are not, such that the attempt to elaborate an economic theory of the family merely results in the application of market models to exchanges between family members: “Conceptualizing marriage as a ‘two-person firm with either member being the entrepreneur who hires the other and receives residual profits’ can be called a rather simple view of a very complex relationship.”7 It’s not a matter of questioning the need for a measuring device capable of defining as equitably as possible the exchanges that take place between men and women within the family unit. Years of research into the “new forms of poverty” have allowed for the development of “equivalency scales” that allow for improvements in the distribution of wealth between domestic economies, but little attention has been paid to redistribution within the family unit (with one exception: the case of single-parent households, in which the child is treated like a husband). What needs to be discussed is the nature of the measuring device. The economic measuring device, which reproduces the juridical principle of sexual equality within the family sphere, reveals a break in the very possibility of comparing the work performed by men and women. Family life certainly involves elements of cooperation and conflict—elements that define the “problem of negotiation” between members of the family unit. But the exchange between male and female labor cannot be reduced

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to its “unionized” dimension, which is legally regulated by lawyers in the courtroom (as in the cases of alimony payments or divorce). Malefemale exchange transcends its “unionized” form. It transcends the quantitative dimension of negotiations concerned only with “precise economic value.” This is true even in the best of cases, when the assessment of women’s domestic activities involves an extension of the concept of family patrimony, such that the income capacities of the husband are recognized as dependent on the wife’s willingness to perform a series of supporting duties.8 The idea of sexual equality is strongly developed on the level of society and on that of contract negotiation, but not on the individual level. Inequality insinuates itself in the rift between representation (universality of the law) and real practices (concrete singularity of habits)—between the formal and the material constitution. Much like the question of sexual harassment, that of housework involves issues of power and authority. This is precisely why we are confronted with incommensurable criteria of valuation. It is useless to pretend that we are eliminating male power simply by subordinating male-female exchange to a common regime of equality. No such regime exists, because the exchange will always involve a supplement and a subjective difference—a disparity in experience that escapes any reduction to units of measure, to units applied to qualitatively heterogeneous quantities of concrete labor. As is well known, the problem of measure can be approached on various levels. First of all, there is the need to abstract from the variety of concrete tasks performed: there are those who iron clothes and those who take care of the children, those who work outside and those who work within the home. In the case of domestic work, the process of abstraction is usually effected by comparing the different activities in terms of labor time (where a specialist job requires a certain amount of training time, this time is included in the calculation). However, and as was seen in the example of the “proper place” for the socks, this abstraction is violently thwarted by the “lived history” of women, which problematizes the reduction to temporal units and the attempt to measure the work performed. Even if the hours worked are the same, the tasks performed by women are much more intensive than those of men. This intensity cannot be reduced to a purely quantitative dimension, as if it were the straightforward result of a specialist knowledge acquired over time (from childhood onward); rather, it reflects the division of sexual roles. Behind the disparity in labor intensity lies an entire history of

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asymmetrical power relationships. The power exercised over women sends into crisis the very possibility of measuring quantities of labor time while applying the same unit of measure to both sexes. In the light of a careful analysis of domestic work processes, the definition of the parity of rights on the basis of reciprocity, or of the equal distribution of working time between men and women, reveals its profound political inadequacy. The quantity of hours worked may be the same, it may even include the training time necessary for specializing in certain functions, but we conflate in the same unit of measurement subjective and historical experiences that are in fact completely heterogeneous. Within the One—the measuring unit—difference hides (in this case the difference between men and women) and multiplicities dwell. It has to be clear that what we have said regarding male-female exchange in the private sphere has a general significance; it concerns the very core of the paradigm guiding the transformation of the capitalist mode of production. The first to realize that there is a contradiction inherent to the exchange of equivalent quantities of labor time (the exchange on the basis of which wages are determined on the labor market) was none other than Adam Smith, the father of political economy. Smith pointed out that the quantity of work contained in the commodities purchased by the worker with his contractually determined wages is one thing, the quantity of work commanded during the labor process another. The wage commands more labor than is necessary for the reproduction of the commodities corresponding to the wage. Command is exerted over labor once the worker enters the production process; the worker’s activity is completely determined by the machines and the organization of the plant, which belong to the capitalist. It is precisely because of this crisis in measurement, very lucidly indicated by Smith, that economic growth and development occur. In fact, if the salary commands more work than is contained in the commodities corresponding to the wage, this command measures labor productivity and, consequently, capitalist growth.9 From Smith onward, economic science has done all it could to eliminate the contradiction that lies at the origin of the incommensurable. What economic science has tried to do is eliminate the qualitative aspect, the “place for the socks,” the surplus behind which is hidden the history of the subjective difference between those who work and those who give orders. In other words, economic science has tried to solve logically a contradiction pertaining to the political sphere of power relations, by

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simplifying inherently differentiated and dialectical categories in terms of formal identities. This is how it has evacuated from its disciplinary field the issue of the political origin of the crisis of measure, becoming economics after being born as political economy. The current crisis of economic indicators reveals how economic science is insufficient for analyzing the transformations taking place today. This insufficiency derives from the very “mission” of economics—from its goal of eliminating the political analysis of power, and of power’s effects on micro- and macro-economic variables, from the field of inquiry. But the “place for the socks” and the crisis of measure it reflects reveal two other things, equally crucial to the current paradigm of transformation. In the sphere of domestic labor, we are dealing with a kind of labor that is becoming central to the post-Fordist regime. It is live labor, where “the product is inseparable from the producer.” This labor, which achieves its own realization within itself, characterizes all forms of personal service. It continues to expand its reach in the directly productive sphere in the form of relational activities. This labor is prevalently live labor because, as is evident in the domestic sphere, machinery (constant capital) is less important than personal work. While it’s certainly true that the twentieth century has seen technology entering the household and rendering less cumbersome a whole series of domestic tasks (like doing laundry), it is equally true that these technologies have not at all reduced the quantity of live labor performed by women. This paradoxical state of affairs has been demonstrated many times by research on technological innovation’s effects on domestic work. The existence of household appliances such as washing machines has not reduced the quantity of live labor; in fact, there has been an increase. This is because the values and the aesthetic and cultural standards involved (the quest for ever more cleanliness, order, and so on) have led women to expand the forms of domestic labor in multiple ways. Instead of bathing the children once a week, we now do this every day. The husband changes his shirt every day. The effect is that of increasing the quantitiy of female labor. Technology has simplified or eliminated a whole series of physically demanding activities, but the socio-cultural context has caused an increase in the quantity and the quality of live domestic labor. Simply by virtue of being both an element and an effect of a certain socio-cultural context, live labor has assumed a series of characteristics that are becoming increasingly typical of a communicational and relational kind

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of labor: by washing and ironing shirts once every two days instead of every ten days (as was done when the standards of cleanliness were less demanding), the wife or partner reinterprets, through her labor, the extrafamilial relational needs of her husband and children. Her labor reproduces the very possibility of maintaining these external social relations. It is impossible to let the husband leave the house wearing the same shirt two days in a row, since this would mean jeopardizing his image and his class status. Live domestic labor therefore reproduces in the private sphere a public relational context. This is precisely why it is an increasingly communicative and symbolic kind of labor, based on the signs, images, and representations of a specific socio-cultural context. In order to be communicative, a woman’s domestic activities require an increase in cognitive qualities; she needs to constantly interpret and translate into live labor the signs and the information coming from the context in which the family lives. She decides whom to invite for dinner and what meal to serve in order to “meet expectations,” elaborates relational strategies geared towards the improvement of her husband’s career prospects, invests in a network of socio-cultural relations to guarantee an environment favorable to her children’s education. In this way, live labor becomes less and less material in the mechanical-executive sense and more and more relational and communicative. This does not reduce the quantity of labor, but rather modifies its very substance. The quantity of live labor does not diminish. It has actually increased, thereby contradicting all those theories of technological development that establish a relationship of linear causality between technological innovation and necessary labor. The incorporation of science into machinery or constant capital allows for the elimination of the industrial part of labor, the part that is material, operative and mechanical. Parallel to the reduction of industrial labor, there is an increase in the communicative and relational work that resorts to the cognitive and interpretative qualities of the people working in a certain context. The fatigue caused by communicative and relational labor is no longer purely physical, but involves the brain, as demonstrated by the proliferation of new pathologies associated with work-related stress.10 It is not surprising, then, that during the last few years the focus of women’s struggle has “shifted” from mobilization for the right to equality to less visible but no less significant and effective forms of struggle. Relationals dynamics, and hence language, are the crucial elements in the new struggles. This shift only seems to mark a defeat with regard to

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male-female equality on the labor market. Of course, the inequality in compensation has not diminished; it has actually increased where other factors (conjunctural, ethnic, migratory) have intervened. Women were the first to be affected by the recession; they were pushed back from the point they had obtained during the phase of economic expansion. Nevertheless, it needs to be pointed out that the “exodus” from wage labor—that is, from the very site of wage discrimination—often began before the recession, as has been demonstrated by research conducted in the United States during the 1980s. According to some researchers, the increase in the average number of children per woman can be partially explained in terms of the “retreat” into the private sphere that took place when the “long march” across the labor market didn’t fulfill its promises. It is certainly very difficult to establish causal relations in such a complex universe. Nonetheless, the hypothesis can be advanced that, faced with an aggravation of wage inequalities between men and women, or in any case with their persistence (constitutional rights notwithstanding), the shift to the relational and communicative terrain reveals not so much a defeat as a genuine innovation in the tools of feminist struggle. If domestic labor is indeed increasingly of a relational and communicative nature, then perhaps the choice of language as the place for defining female identity and difference originates in this mutation. In any case, the persistence of domestic labor explains why women preceded men in developing forms of antagonism proper to the field of linguistic and relational communication. Language, the ability to communicate, is in fact far more universal than the rights inscribed in the constitution. The difference consists in the fact that the universality of rights such as the right to parity is purely formal. As such, it has to contend with the reality of power relations in everyday life, be it at work or in the home. Formal rights are quickly detached from people when we enter the universe of work and the immediate private relationships between men and women. Language, on the other hand, displays a peculiar feature that distinguishes it from formal rights: while it is also public and universal in nature (like constitutional rights), language is never detached from people. It always “transcends” the reality of personal power relations; it is an immanent resource that can be tapped into every time one needs to redefine one’s identity and difference with respect to the other who gives orders. Language is the “place” where we can best conjugate the I and the We, the singular and the collective, the private and the public. In the case of feminine language and communication, what is genuinely new compared

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to more traditional forms of struggle is the fact that the public sphere immediately constitutes a political community. As Ida Dominijanni points out, the far-reaching political innovation resides […] in the forms that we choose for our speech and for our silence, for changing reality or interpreting a changing reality: for intervening in politics or building social ties. We have never adopted the same forms, the same gestures and the same words used in the politics of men. Often we have been told that we didn’t speak or we didn’t do enough: the truth is that we acted and we spoke in a different way. […] The feminine revolution is like this, it doesn’t follow either the parties or the classical modes of visibility and conflict. We haven’t lost sight of the enemy: we often find him elsewhere than under his classical masks. We have not lost our speech according to a “prudent strategy of retreat”: but we don’t do politics with press-conferences, and for the most part not even with street demonstrations. The words of women are just at hand, for anyone wanting to listen: in the homes and in the factories, in parliaments, in the unions, in the parties, in the newspapers.

It hardly needs to be added that here […] the stakes are not limited to women, but involve the paradigms of transformation, the realism of utopia. Politics is not played on the table of governments, but in the field of interpretation.11

3. Value in the Information Economy With the first signs of economic recovery—during 1991 in the United States and at the beginning of 1994 in Europe and Japan—it seemed clear that the end of the recession would modify certain fundamental economic relations. One in particular has been discussed practically everywhere: the relationship between investment and employment. The expression “growth without jobs”12 has quickly become a slogan capable of inspiring both hope and fear: those who lost their jobs during the recession feared not finding a new one, and those who felt liberated from the obligation to work hoped to change their lives in a fundamental manner. The ambivalence of the expression “growth without jobs” needs to be questioned without resorting to simplifications and independently from enthusiasm and anxiety. One thing is certain: the application of information technology changes the very nature of the relationship between investment and occupation, in the sense that the causal linearity that has always linked them is rescinded. This means that a certain volume of investment can

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lead either to a reduction or to an increase in the rate of employment. The significance of this relationship is not given a priori, but rather depends on the choice—made by entrepreneurs, the unions, or the state—of creating jobs that establish a proportion between the volume of wealth to be produced and the kind of occupation created. Ever since the discovery of the “visible physical quantity” that a group of engineers working for the Bell corporation in 1942-43 called “information,” we know we are facing a new dimension of matter.13 Norbert Wiener, one of the fathers of cybernetics, defined information in negative terms: “Information is neither mass nor energy: information is information.” Speaking before the American Academy of Science, Boulding said: “Here is the third fundamental dimension of matter.” Shannon developed a theory of information as a visible physical quantity that can be used in order to ensure a superior transmission of signals. (The time is the middle of the Second World War, and the Americans needed to protect their naval traffic to Europe with informational systems.) Defined in these terms, information is the essence of the new productive technologies. The definition of this third dimension of matter is completely tautological: “Information is information.”14 In any case, the tautology is productive by virtue of the rules, the syntax, and the specific software that ensure the functioning of this strange linguistic machine. The machine functions on the basis of an elementary unit of information, the “bit” (binary digit). The bit isn’t in any way a unit of “meaning.” It is a unit that can assume either of two distinct values, normally 0 and 1. The meaning of this information is not determined a priori, but depends on the organization of the program and on the way the program is put to use by its operator. Once information technology is applied to productive and distributive processes, the fluctuation of employment rates follows a logic different from the one that has traditionally determined the relationship between investment in machines and the creation of jobs related to the use of these machines. The spread of information technology renders the creation of jobs problematic because, as we have seen, it determines a crisis of the indicators traditionally used in economic forecasting. On the one hand, the accelerated development of information technology is rapidly undermining the importance of the software program’s physical or material container. Hardware prices are falling at a constant rate even as new software programs vertiginously increase the

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potential of information technology. This is enough to explode statistical indicators based on the relationship between the costs of fixed capital (machinery) and the financial volume of investments. On the other hand, the use of the new technologies is anything but pre-determined. A new computer can simply be used as a superior writing machine, but it can also become the basis for multiple and extremely productive applications. Everything depends on the kind of organization that is developed “around” the new technologies; it depends on the training programs available in primary schools and schools of engineering, and on the political decision to reduce labor costs, maintain the same rate of employment, or both (by reducing the number of fulltime employees and resorting to outside or part-time workers). For now, the logic of this decision is opportunistic: in some cases, it is convenient to lay off workers; in others, image-related reasons make it is preferable to wait (today, this is the case in banking and in the insurance business); in still other situations, it is convenient to invest in networks that connect productive units scattered across the world, thereby creating jobs abroad rather than in the country of origin. One example of the resulting uncertainty over investment strategies and their effects on employment is so-called reengineering15, the latest “trend” in management science.16 Reengineering, which could also be termed “reconfiguration,” consists in a radical modification of a company’s mode of operation: a breaking down of vertical organizational structures (“deverticalizaton”) and a consistent application of those new forms of information technology (expert systems, videodiscs, telecommunications, and so on) that were previously employed only in a mechanical way, without structural transformation. Reengineering allows company managers to take full advantage of computers by rethinking the very organization of management, rather than by simply introducing computers into pre-existing bureaucratic-administrative procedures, as in the past. The term “reengineering” derives directly from the field of information technology; it was invented by Michael Hammer, a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hammer was inspired to coin the term while teaching his customers how to use computers in order to improve company efficiency. The old software programs utilized in company management needed to be dismantled and rebuilt in order to fit newer and more powerful computers. The task was all the more urgent since everyone had purchased a computer at some point after the 1970s, but without obtaining significant returns in terms of efficiency. In many cases, the opposite was true: additional

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workers (computer experts) had to be hired. A new cost had arisen—one sustainable in times of plenty, but not in times of scarcity. People soon realized that the old software programs combined certain procedures with an entire organization of labor (characterized, for example, by an excessive segmentation of the work process) and that this was precisely the cause of the inefficiency. Hence the enthusiasm for organizational rethinking: in some cases, this meant a straightforward “restructuring” of the company, that is, layoffs; in others, there resulted original forms of experimentation and innovation that eliminated hazardous or mindless jobs and reintegrated previously distinct functions (abolishing, for instance, the frontier between engineers and marketing specialists). “Reengineering Makes Companies Efficient and Shows Workers the Door,” headlined The Wall Street Journal, adding that millions of jobs might be eliminated in coming years. According to John Skerrit of Anderson Consulting, this might be the social question of the near future. Paradoxically computers, once synonymous with modernity and efficiency, have become inefficient due to their mechanical and unintelligent utilization, and this has had negative repercussions on people’s quality of life. As soon as profits began to dwindle, people appealed to techniques such as reengineering in order to reduce personnel—a sign of the shortsightedness of companies, and often also of unions. Companies investing in the new technologies blindly reproduced the procedural defects that had existed prior to the introduction of computers. Unions failed to demand different and more desirable forms of work when it was still possible, and are now being punished with a net loss of work. In some cases, the fiscal incentives meant to promote innovative industries produce effects contrary to what was intended: when it becomes more convenient to put to work capital, rather than people, a situation results in which workers are laid off both by the companies producing computers and by those using them. If low-wage labor can be easily recruited, as it can in border regions, mechanization gives way to the extensive use of a labor force whose costs are lower than those of machinery (“Mexicanization”). And if the technical competency of migrant labor increases, as it has in past years, then it may happen that part-time workers are enlisted to mount extremely complicated chips in garages or over-crowded apartments, as is now the case in Silicon Valley. Reengineering is simply one management technique among others, and is far from being applied in a linear way. Even its promoters admit to a failure rate of between 60 and 80 percent, in a situation where 69

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percent of American and 75 percent of European companies are already undergoing “reconfiguration.” Without a strategy that takes into consideration the multiplicity of factors involved, even the most intelligent use of information technology risks being totally ineffective. A fundamental characteristic of the new technologies—on the basis of which investment strategies and their effects on the rate of employment can be analyzed—is the progressive loss of importance of fixed capital, or machinery, in the determination of economic value. Nowadays nobody purchases Apple or IBM stocks on the basis of considerations about the material assets owned by these corporations. What counts is not the real estate or the machinery owned by a company, but its contacts and the potential inherent in its marketing network, the strength of its sales, the organizational abilities of its managers and the inventive capacity of its personnel. These are the so-called “intangible” assets or goods, true symbols, for which we still don’t have a statistical or financial measuring device. Since stocks are a symbol of ownership (of a part of the company’s profits), and since the capital represented by stocks is also a system of symbols for the “ability to produce” wealth, we are witnessing a proliferation of symbols that endlessly mirror one another. As Alvin Toffler says, capital is rapidly becoming “super-symbolic.” The measurement of the intellectual capital of a company is only in its early stages, but there is already a “movement” of scholars who, having understood the pivotal role of knowledge and of immaterial labor in the “New Economy,” are conducting field research in this area. Banks, for instance, have a strong need to know “the value of intangibles” (soft assets) associated with the companies that ask them for credit; companies, in turn, have to be in a position to calculate the value of their intellectual capital in order to create development strategies on a highly competitive market.17 The loss of importance of fixed capital in the determination of capital value—to the point where there now exists an entire literature on the “virtual enterprises” of a not-so-distant future—dramatically modifies the categories on which the study of economic value used to be based. “The value of tangible goods can disappear overnight. But how can we evaluate the intangibles?” This is the question raised by Rob Petersen, vice-president of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. First of all, value is extracted during the entire production/delivery process of a commodity/service.18 The post-Fordist economy is not characterized by the fact that people have suddenly decided to satisfy

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their needs with immaterial goods, but by the increasing integration of the activities pertaining to the economic sphere. The basic premises of the new production paradigm are connections rather than separations, forms of integration rather than of segmentation, real-time simultaneity rather than sequential phases. In other words, production neither starts nor ends in the factory. We can therefore affirm that productivity, as a measure of increases in economic value, begins even before the worker arrives in the office. Indeed, in the evaluation/measurement of a company’s intellectual capital, the central idea is that knowledge is both an intellectual and a relational material, both content and culture. It’s not a matter of creating gigantic indicators, a sort of encyclopedia of knowledge similar to the one created by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, but rather of the elaboration of maps tracing a diffuse knowledge and allowing companies to find the “places” where knowledge is born, both inside and outside the factory. The objective is to keep a close eye on the people who remember the formulas, and then to develop the technologies that will “make them talk.” According to Arian Ward, a theorist of business engineering, “people think in terms of stories, not of facts.” This is why we need to draft maps capable of retracing the “song lines” described by Bruce Chatwin in his account of Australian aborigines: roads, trails, conduits of informal wisdom, “highways of knowledge,” metaphors referring to other metaphors, the places where those original pieces of information needed in order to differentiate oneself in an increasingly homologizing market lie hidden. According to the world’s first “director of intellectual capital,” Leif Edvinson of Scandinavian Assurance and Financial Services, “our financial assets stay here after five o’clock, but a good part of our intellectual capital goes back home.” The specific working activity occurring during the productive process is therefore impossible to measure by traditional criteria. The classic definition of productivity, which relates the value of the finished product to the cost of the factors of production (labor and/or invested capital), no longer has any operational meaning. This criterion of measure was effective in a time when telecommunications, services, and immaterial technologies were neither as diffuse nor as decisive as they are today. Now we are witnessing the birth of “cognitive laborers,” a class of producers no longer “commanded,” to use Adam Smith’s terminology, by machines external to live labor, but rather by technologies that are increasingly mental, symbolic, and communicative. The new fixed capital, the new machine that commands live labor and

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makes the worker produce, is no longer a physically identifiable and specifically situated tool, but tends rather to be located within the worker herself, in her brain and in her soul. This means that the new form of fixed capital is constituted by a network of social and vital relations, by the ways in which production and information are first acquired and later, after coalescing in laborforce, activated in the production process. The progressive dematerialization of the modes of production is accompanied by a sort of spatialization of the socio-cultural resources that combine in the composition of “cognitive laborers,” the class constituted by post-Fordist immaterial producers. Any social context can become the fixed capital whose combination with live labor makes that live labor productive, and therefore competitive at the international level. In fact, the human resource of intellectuality is the true origin of value, but this origin amounts to nothing if it isn’t captured and transformed into a company asset. This calls for the elaboration of intellectual structures, such as information systems, which provide channels of knowledge and constitute the medium for consumer relations. These systems are the basis for the reproduction of the “cartography,” for the interaction among different kinds of information. According to the formula developed by Dave Ulrich, a professor at the University of Michigan, “learning capacity equals g times g,” that is, it is equal to a company’s ability to generate new ideas, multiplied by the company’s ability to generalize those ideas. Productivity cannot be measured on the basis of the quantity of goods produced per hour, nor can it be determined by reference to a specific company or economic sector. What is measured, instead, is a multiplicity of factors characterizing a social and regional space that transcends the single worker and allows her to create wealth by being a member of a community. It is therefore no paradox that the same companies where people are studying how to better measure the value of intangibles have suppressed their internal adjournment workshops. It isn’t just a matter of (enormous) costs whose benefits are difficult to quantify, but of a new strategy of diffusion/accumulation, which plays out in increasingly informal ways. The employees can study written materials, consult their colleagues, or take classes, if they want; what really counts for the company is evaluating the development of its human capital, not the amount of money spent on training classes. The real evaluation consists in the “social validation” of the intellectual capital developed—that is, in the degree of customer satisfaction that can be translated into sales volume.

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As is only normal, it is at the moment of sale that the human resources activated in the production process are monetized and therefore measured. As abstract value par excellence, money sanctions the value of human capital, “reducing it to a commodity,” revealing its market inadequacies, and providing information—comparable to inventory data—on where and how to intervene in order to better adapt production to market demand. One consequence is that investment decisions made on a purely company-based calculation, such as decisions intended to reduce direct compensation or social benefits (indirect compensation) in order to respond to ferocious international competition, risk exposing the company to a “boomerang effect.” The company may benefit in the short term, but in the medium and long term such decisions contribute to the destruction of the socio-cultural context in which the company is inscribed, and which is at the very basis of its productive capacity. The accounting methods still common today treat the “brick and mortar” owned by the company as a capital asset, but refuse to consider intellectual capital as an expense!19 The investment strategies and incentives elaborated by communities in order to promote investment are increasingly based on the growth of the “socio-cultural machinery,” of the identity-building “cognitive capital” capable of producing wealth when it comes into contact with live labor. It is also clear that a company is not innovative simply because it invests in advanced technologies: neither technology as such, nor even the “trendiest” management models are capable of ensuring local or regional development. The only innovations truly deserving of social incentives are those promoting the development of the social cognitive capital that is tapped into by each particular company according to its own preferred modalities of development. 4. Spaces of Interpretation The crisis in the measure of value was obviously bound to reverberate within the different theories of compensation which, from the end of the 1970s onward, have been proposed in order to explain or legitimate certain choices in the compensation policies adopted at the company level. The gradual spread of post-Fordism has caused a complete reversal in the understanding of compensation: compensation is no longer understood as the price of labor-power determined by the application of a specific rule (that of supply and demand), but rather as the result of an interpretive act that concerns a set of rules. This radical change of perspective

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is inscribed in the new way in which most economic problems are now treated: economic theory’s center of gravity has shifted from the market to the company. The impossibility of foreseeing everything, the volatility typical of post-Fordism, has put into question traditional models of unlimited rationality, forcing us to define restricted fields of rational calculation (limited rationality). The collective research project “Working Under Different Rules,” conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research under the direction of American economist and Harvard professor Richard B. Freeman, has underscored the decisive role of rules and institutions in labor market dynamics by means of a comparative study of North America (the United States and Canada), Europe, and Japan. The results of the study can be summarized as follows: 1. During the 1980s, the discrepancy in compensation increased everywhere, but only in the United States did we witness a consistent decline in “real” wages, particularly in the area of unskilled labor. In the United States, job creation has been made possible by poverty rates that are significantly higher than those of Europe and Japan. 2. Worker representation at the company level (worker commissions) or in specific economic sectors has seriously declined in the United States. In countries like Germany and Canada, worker commissions have proved to be “resilient” institutions, capable of resisting even in periods characterized by a crisis of collective bargaining and a marked loss of trade union power (although in Canada these commissions are concerned only with issues such as health insurance and work safety). 3. In the United States, employees have less access to in-company professional training than in Europe and Japan. In the United States, there is a preference for learning by doing.20 While it increases short-term productivity, this strategy is inadequate in the long term. 4. In the compensation pyramid, the lower class of American workers has a standard of living far below that of corresponding European and Japanese workers. The Social Security network does not provide a sufficient income for the lower strata of the American population. The increase of American poverty rates with respect to those of other economically advanced countries occurred between the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. 5. The different dynamics typical of the United States and of other advanced nations can be traced to variations in the capacity of labor institutions to intervene in the determination of wages and influence the quality of training. The role of the state in guaranteeing an adequate level of training has proven to be essential in every country with the exception of the United States. 6. The comparison of the various countries examined shows that effective labor representation at the company level is possible only when it is adequately supported by labor legislation. SubStance #112, Vol. 36, no. 1, 2007

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7. The preservation of the welfare state is essential for reducing the inequalities in gross compensation created by the market economy—that is, for improving the distribution of available profits. This improvement always implies a cost to the community, either in fiscal or in deficit terms. 8. Social intervention has modest effects on the functioning of the job market, especially when redistribution measures are directly or indirectly related to policies designed to re-integrate workers into the world of labor. 9. The inequalities in the different levels of education and training strongly contribute to the aggravation of inequalities in the distribution of income. Policies aimed at increasing the qualified labor-force start positive processes in the quest for increasing income through re-training. 10. Guaranteeing an adequate income to the less qualified sectors of labor helps preserve occupational opportunities for the long-term unemployed. While this income is lowest in the United States, that country also has a lower rate of unemployment. 11. Those European countries (mainly Great Britain) that tried to make their job market more flexible by following the example of the American “model” during the 1980s have not been able to vanquish unemployment in any significant way.

At this point, the question needs to be raised whether the “virtues” of the European and Japanese social systems—which, the researchers conclude, the United States should adopt in order to break out of the spiral “job-creation/pauperization”—can actually survive under a postFordist and strongly globalized economic regime. In all European countries, the recession of the early 1990s has been used to impose “American style”21 deregulation. The strategy of making employment more flexible in order to respond to market fluctuations in real time is adopted in order to reduce wages and increase the specific productivity of labor. Harassed by an entrepreneurial class that wants them to contain the cost of income replacement (in particular that of unemployment compensation), the European welfare states can only redirect social intervention towards the goal of guaranteeing a survival income, even if this is only possible by the kind of social mobilization that has occurred in France. What is more, the struggle against structural unemployment is only possible if the communicative and relational activities associated with personal services are legitimated in socioeconomic terms. From the point of view of the relation between direct and indirect compensation, the deregulation of the job market brings to the fore the issue of recuperating productivity gains for pensions, disability insurance, and unemployment benefits. According to a study conducted in Germany by McKinsey Consultants, reducing both labor costs and SubStance #112, Vol. 36, no. 1, 2007

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the financial pressure of social programs without increasing long-term unemployment requires a significant expansion of part-time work.22 McKinsey’s analysts write that achieving both more flexible forms of production and productivity gains requires reducing labor time for an increasing number of active workers (around 60 percent of the total workforce). The study shows that work productivity can increase between 3 and 20 percentage points when labor time is reduced, thanks to an increase in personal output,23 a more elastic management of demand fluctuations, and an extension of the life span of companies. Work productivity can also expand as a result of a higher motivation to work and a reduction of stress and absenteeism. In the strategy of generalizing part-time work, the transfer of productivity gains is crucial. McKinsey estimates that a 25 percent reduction in labor time should not imply a salary reduction greater than 15 percent, especially in the case of low-wage workers, for whom it is essential that the state guarantees the minimum for survival. What is more, in order to be effective, this model must guarantee the possibility of returning to full-time employment, and the choice to reduce one’s working hours must not increase the risk of being laid off when the company wants to reduce its workforce. Whatever one thinks of the model presented by McKinsey, it is important to underscore that combining flexibility, productivity, and labor cost reduction requires a reduction in working hours. Furthermore, the guarantee of a wage reduction less than proportional to the reduction in hours worked introduces the notion of rules established by the company, the employees, and the welfare state. These are rules that need to include the subjects populating the universe of subcontracting, if one wants to avoid a situation in which resistance to lower wages is responded to by out-sourcing.24 Without these subjects, the interpretation of the rules would be incomplete from the very beginning. Rules and their interpretation are, indeed, the two terms that characterize the most recent income theories. 25 In describing the interpretation of the local and general rules guiding the determination of parameters utilized to calculate total income, productivity rates, and job security, these theories affirm the centrality of the notion of “cognitive dissonance.” For the rules to be interpreted correctly, it is necessary to define the spaces where these rules can be interpreted by all parties concerned. While it is true that a rule only exists to the extent to which it is applied, it is also true that the application of a rule requires interpretation, and therefore the possibility for the multiple subjects

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participating in the definition of the rule to express the knowledge that defines their specific identity. In other words, the deregulation of the job market calls forth the notion of a space of interpretation, understood as a place for negotiation that is absolutely essential if we want to avoid negative, “American style” consequences for the labor force. Thus defined, compensation becomes a mechanism for the distribution of collective knowledge, a knowledge that needs to be made explicit by the negotiating subjects in order for them to be able to interpret the proposed rules. In this movement towards the opening of spaces for interpretation, we can retrace the effort to avoid a development in which the linguistic turn of the economy is not accompanied by an equally crucial re-definition of the spaces and modalities of wage negotiation. Instrumental and communicative action should coincide not just in the field of commodity and service production, but also in the space where social relations are reproduced, the space where knowledge and income are distributed. Translated by Giuseppina Mecchia

Notes 1. See Alain Bihr, “Crise du sens et tentation autoritaire,” Le Monde Diplomatique (May 1992), pp. 16-17. 2. English in original. (Translator’s note.) 3. “The World According to Andy Grove,” Businees Week, June 6 1994, pp. 60-62. 4. See the Introduction, “The Question Then…” in What is Philosophy by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (Columbia University Press, 1994). We could say that philosophers, in so far as they are “producers of concepts” or “immaterial laborers,” share a friendship with their concepts, because the friend is the condition for thinking itself. A philosopher is literally “the friend of knowledge.” 5. “The World According to Andy Grove” (61). 6. Jean-Claude Kauffmann, La Trame conjugale. Analyse du couple par son linge (Paris: Nathan, 1992) 192. 7. Amartya Sen, Resources, Values, Development (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984) 371-372. Translator’s note: In this passage, Sen is quoting G. Becker, A Treatise on the Family (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981) ix. 8. See Marzio Barbagli, Provando e Riprovando. Matrimonio, famiglia e divorzio in Italia e in altri paesi occidentali (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990). 9. On Adam Smith’s individuation of the contradiction inherent to the theory of labor value, see Claudio Napoleoni, Valore (Milan: ISEDI, 1976). It should be noted that the first economist who attempted to solve the contradiction between contained and commanded labor was David Ricardo. Marx, on the other hand, supported neither Smith nor Ricardo; instead, he emphasized the contradiction between the two approaches. Smith’s approach is considered valid for the explanation of development, Ricardo’s for that of exchange as circulation and distribution of goods. According to

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Marx, there is no solution to this contradiction, because we are dealing with two different qualities of labor: contained labor is dead labor, already performed, while commanded labor is live labor, “subjectivity in action” – labor that has to be commanded in order to function in an economic system where the workers are separated from the means of production. 10. See the important work by Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: the Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York: Basic Books, 1993) 1-15. See also Barbagli 1990, chapter 6. 11. Ida Dominijanni, “La società degli uomini,” il manifesto, September 13, 1994. 12. English in original. (Translator’s note.) 13. See Jacques Robin, “Mutation technologique, stagnation de la pensée,” Le Monde Diplomatique, March 1993, page 12. 14. On the tautological character of the conventionalist (post-Newtonian and postGalilean) paradigms of production, see Paolo Virno, Convenzione e materialismo. L’unicità senza aurea (Rome and Naples: Theoria, 1986) 37-52. 15. English in original. (Translator’s note.) 16. See Michael Hammer and James Champy, Reengineering (Paris: Dunod, 1993) and Franco Carlini “Gli stagionali dei chips. USA, alta tecnologia a bassa occupazione,” il manifesto, April 6, 1993. 17. See Thomas A. Steward, “Your Company’s Most Valuable Asset: Intellectual Capital,” Fortune, October 1994, pages 28-33. 18. See Alvin Toffler, Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century (New York: Bantam, 1991) 80-83. 19. See the important study by Charles Goldfinger, L’Utile et le Futile. L’économie de l’immatériel (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1994), particularly chapter 4. 20. English in original. (Translator’s note.) 21. English in original. (Translator’s note.) 22. A summary of the study by Helmut Hagmann, director of McKinsey’s Munich branch, has been published in the Wall Street Journal, October 27, 1994. 23. English in original. (Translator’s note.) 24. English in original. (Translator’s note.) 25. A summary of these theories can be found in the works of Bénédicte Reynaud, Le Salaire, la règle et le marché (Paris: Bourgois, 1992) and Les Théories du Salaire (Paris: La Découverte, 1994).

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Introduction to Paolo Virno’s

“On the Parasitic Character of Wage Labor” and “Post-Fordist Semblance” Paolo Virno was active in the Italian autonomist left during the 1970s, when he edited the journal Metropoli. He has worked as an editor for the communist daily il manifesto and has published mainly in the fields of philosophy and political theory. His works include Convenzione e materialismo. L’unicità senza aurora (Rome: Theoria, 1986) [Convention and Materialism. Uniqueness Without A Halo], Mondanità. L’idea di ‘mondo’ tra esperienza e sfera pubblica (Rome: manifestolibri, 1994) [Wordliness. The Idea of “the World” Between Experience and the Public Sphere], and the recent Grammatica della moltitudine (Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2002), which has been translated into English as A Grammar of the Multitude (New York: semiotext[e], 2004). In the two short essays translated below, Virno addresses the social consequences of the transformations of labor characteristic of the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. “On the Parasitic Character of Wage Labor” polemicizes against those “neoliberal” economic theories that celebrate the decline of the welfare state but refuse to abandon its ideological corollary, the Fordist work ethic. “Automation plus guaranteed income”—a program that can be traced back to the labor struggles of the 1960s and that found expression in the publications of the international situationist movement as well as in certain currents of the Italian autonomist left—is identified as the only realistic response to the end of full employment. The essay “Post-Fordist Semblance” examines ideological phenomena such as the celebration of “self-employment” and traces them to the material transformations of the sphere of production. “On the Parasitic Character of Wage Labor” was first published in the journal Metropoli in June 1981. “Post-Fordist Semblance” first appeared in La Rivista del manifesto, a journal published by the Italian communist daily il manifesto, in April 2001. Both essays have been republished, along with many other short works by Virno, in the volume Esercizi di esodo. Linguaggio e azione politica (Verona: ombre corte, 2002) [Exercises in Exodus. Language and Political Action]. Max Henninger, translator

© Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2007

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On the Parasitic Character of Wage Labor Paolo Virno The ruthless critique of the welfare state and the renewed epos of the market have taken center stage in the political debate, to the point where a modern “dictionary of commonplaces” would necessarily have to begin with the concepts that inspire the polemic on welfare, intervention after intervention. In fact, these concepts are characterized by the somewhat phantasmagoric rigidity of commedia dell’arte character masks; to comment on each of them individually would be not just tedious, but also futile. It seems more worthwhile to concentrate on a single aspect of the debate, the one most helpful in terms of deciphering the new forms of social conflict—namely, the problem of how labor has become an excessive social liability between the decline of the welfare state and the new wave of economic liberalism. That the crisis of the welfare state results from an ungovernable rise in social spending, destined to confront an expanding area of non-labor, is something we are told ad nauseam. In other words, the taxes raised on income derived from market transactions are supposedly being used to finance an inactive or “unproductive” social sector – one that tends to violate the rules of competition and remuneration. In this account, labor and non-labor, labor and welfare, the free market and the political marketplace confront one another through a precise distribution of moral roles and values: economic viability versus social parasitism, entrepreneurial vitality versus the stagnation of welfare. It would seem, then, that the progressive expansion of the “leisure” sectors of the population has represented a grievous impediment to development. Let’s be clear: this account is nothing if not ideological. It’s a powerful ideology, to be sure, all the more powerful inasmuch as it presents itself as common sense, revealing the real causes of the crisis like a mirror—accurately, but the wrong way round. A closer look, one that pierces through the veil of reassuring assumptions, reveals that the crisis of the welfare state results from the throttled, restrained, less-than-modest development of the area of nonlabor, which is to say: there isn’t too much non-labor, but too little. The crisis results from a disproportionately large “active population”—a crisis caused, that is, not by the extent of welfare, but by the fact that welfare is made to expand, for the most part, in the form of wage labor, and, vice36

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versa, by the fact that today wage labor increasingly presents itself as welfare. “Dig holes and fill them up again” Whoever genuinely wants to understand the affliction that undermines post-Keynesian states needs look not so much at the rise in “social spending” as at the rates of employment. It is these rates of employment that are excessive—and not so much with regard to administrative work or services, to be sure. Even if the hypothesis that these are the overdeveloped sectors were correct, such a hypothesis would still only be a way of avoiding the central problem, which is that of factory labor, or rather of its excessive development. This is the real issue: wage labor reveals itself everywhere as being at odds with competition, outside of every market logic, due to its inflationary but inflexible costs. Today the repetitive and rigidly organized manual labor typical of mass production assumes the paradoxical character of a fictitious activity, of genuine faux frais or false costs; it becomes a roundabout and disguised form of welfare. Now, the achievement of decades of labor struggles is, extraordinarily, to have rendered physical exertion radically “anti-economic.” Only the idiotic pride of the “producer” sees it with shame and embarrassment. And yet nothing is more inappropriate than timidity. The time has come to acknowledge, without anguish, the fictitious and crass character of the labor market, to champion this scandalous and undeniable reality as the result of a relentless struggle over the wage and the workday. If the welfare state has reached the point of collapse, this is due precisely to the irrational defense of employment through public spending. It’s due to the attempt to make welfare and labor coincide wherever possible. When the politics of full employment emerged in the 1930s, wasn’t its battle cry “Dig holes and fill them up again”? What seemed a perverse limit case has become the rule at the very heart of social production, such that those who wander about like Diogenes with his lantern, forever in search of “parasitism,” might be advised to direct their attention at the factory. Automation plus guaranteed income, or, on economic realism Labor ceases to be competitive when its costs turn out to be higher than the use of new machines. And that is the present situation: to expand or even maintain today’s rates of employment would require a level of investment considerably higher than the large-scale introduction of automated productive processes.

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It follows that automation and the introduction of a guaranteed income would constitute far more “economic” measures than the use of wage labor. This is because today, unlike in the nineteenth century, science has to be competitive, but labor does not. This is the first thing that would have to be acknowledged by those who invoke the market and its “invisible hand,” provided they don’t merely want to echo, in an inevitably farcical manner, the “spirit of Manchester.” Automation plus guaranteed income: paradoxically, a “neoliberalism” that takes itself seriously would have to opt for nothing less, accepting that the social cost of direct monetary assistance is lower than that of labor, and breaking definitively the unjustified and parasitic link between the right to exist and the expense of labor force. The bankruptcy of the welfare state constitutes a historical opportunity: that of measuring social productivity via activities that take place beyond the threshold of immediate reproduction. This is especially true since it’s clear that an individual whose income is guaranteed is far more “productive,” in every sense, than one who spends eight hours a day on the assembly line.

The Imposition of Labor and the Science of Administration But the ability to think coherently and radically is clearly not a virtue that the “neoliberals” possess. This is as true of Friedman and his “Chicago School” as of their Italian counterparts. Without exception, their analyses refer exclusively to the goods and services market, placidly ignoring the transformations that have taken place on the labor market. In fact, they treat the latter as equivalent to the former, without acknowledging its specific character. Consequently, when the “neoliberals” don’t simply yearn for a drastic reduction in the costs associated with the individual employee, they propose measures intended to favor the spontaneous reduction of the area of non-labor—a proposal that is not only unrealistic, as has been seen, but also only appears to ameliorate the contradictions of the welfare state; in reality, it can only aggravate them. As soon as one steps behind the scenes of the little theater where the ideological dispute over welfare takes place, it becomes possible to identify a point of profound agreement between the two parties. Everyone agrees, without exception, that labor is and will continue to be the main instrument of social control and political legitimization of the state. Whatever assessment is given of the volume of social spending or of the self-

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regulating mechanisms of the market, there is no dispute over the necessity of linking the distribution of income to labor; this necessity must not be called into question in the political debate. The reason is essential: wage labor represents the only possibility of systematically simplifying, and hence governing, the complexity of social relations. Labor as such, not money: in fact this complexity is rooted in monetary flows, and it is due to them that it expands. The science of administration retains its operational centrality to the extent that it is concerned with the administration of labor. The Pomp of Hypocrisy Numerous examples from Italian history demonstrate that proposals for a monetary income de-linked from the expense of labor-power constitute an authentic political scandal and an intolerable index of contradiction. We will cite two particularly obvious examples: the national layoff fund known as the cassa integrazione guadagni and law 285 on juvenile employment. With the diffuse and prolonged use of the Italian layoff fund, hypocrisy—that particular form of hypocrisy that is the work ethic— has come out in full pomp. As is well known, in the case of many enterprises the layoff fund has not been used to facilitate restructuring, but has become a semi-permanent institution. In fact, people who had not worked for months or years were guaranteed a wage. To be sure, this guarantee was obscured by the persistence of the “labor relation.” To be guaranteed a wage, the worker had to continue to be formally employed. In a peculiar reversal of the real terms of the problem—an ideological reversal that nonetheless had material implications—the guaranteed income timidly disguised itself as the “anticipation” of a future return to work. In many cases, the result was that production was resumed, after an interval of variable length, but always under the same conditions as before, without any technological innovation; the layoff fund simply served as a subsidy for production. The explanation lies in the willful maintenance of an institutional link between the wage and labor; this link is typical of the system of the layoff fund. In fact the local, circumscribed, formally limited character of the guaranteed income that was thus made available, its character as an occasional exception rather than as a general rule, leads to the “expectation of work” becoming the only possible solution in each specific case. Needless to say, this “expectation of work” is harkened to by entrepreneurs and politicians, but hardly ever by workers; in any case, it’s enough to ensure that non-

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competitive enterprises can continue to exist indefinitely. The refusal of the guaranteed income as a general and explicitly recognized right brings with it, in this case as in others, the risk of a shortage of funds on the part of the entrepreneur. As for the law on juvenile employment, it hardly merits more than a few ironic remarks, since its miserable failure is well known. With stunning ignorance, a genuine work machine has been set up for the new generations, clearly oriented towards a rigid command structure and the implementation of a full work day, while self-determination, mobility, and a preference for flexible employment have become deep-rooted habits for young workers. In other words, the state has promised a prolonged flow of wages in return for totally fictitious, but controllable labor— once again. Translated by Max Henninger

Post-Fordist Semblance Paolo Virno The subject of these notes is “socially necessary semblance” under post-Fordism. By this little formula (of Marxian origin, by the way), I refer to the ensemble of mentalities, images of the world and of oneself, behaviors and beliefs which, while false (that is, semblances) nonetheless originate in and derive a certain legitimacy from certain quite real and persistent aspects of today’s mode of production. It’s not a question, in other words, of subjective errors produced by the dominant culture, but of representations forcefully suggested by a very concrete condition. What is needed is an identification of the grain of truth that sustains false semblance. Such an investigation aims at a materialist recognition of subjectivity as it exists within post-Fordist capitalism. It would certainly be more comforting to assume that the illusions current today are the product of media propaganda and that they can therefore be refuted by means of a patient pedagogical project of clarification. Unfortunately this is not the case. There is a material basis for ideology, an objective foundation that reinforces and reproduces deception. To give a classic example: in the work of Marx, a considerable part of capitalist ideology is traced back to that rather concrete institution that

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is … the wage. By being paid after labor has been made available, the wage in fact powerfully imposes the false belief that what is being remunerated is the work performed, when in fact what the capitalist purchases on the market is, for Marx, rather labor-power, the worker’s pure psychosomatic capacity to produce. It is worth asking, then, what corresponds to the wage as an “ideological fact” in the era of postFordism: what are the contemporary foundations of socially necessary semblance? We will discuss three of many possible examples. 1. Self-employment It’s not difficult to identify the material conditions that substantiate the illusory conviction of a considerable number of subordinated workers that they are able to and/or have to behave as “their own employers.” Here, I want to insist on only one aspect of this phenomenon: so-called self-employment has its concrete basis in what precedes productive activity properly speaking—that is, in the vicissitudes one has to confront before performing this or that job (or in the interval between one job and another). No workers believe themselves to be managing their own lives because of the way they work, but rather because of the way they come to terms with the labor market. The time devoted to finding long-term employment (often quite a protracted period, riddled with brief and diverse jobs that are off the books, seasonal etc.) is at the heart of the “self-employment” experienced by post-Fordist workers. This protracted “search” is no longer an empty and passive intermediate period, but a genuine activity that requires initiative, open-mindedness, calculation, a sense of compatibility, and even some rudimentary analysis of “market tendencies.” The person in search of employment ends up looking somewhat like a small stock broker, or a manager with public relations skills. Without the traditional mechanisms of job placement, it has become necessary to establish informal relations with the most diverse interlocutors. These relations, often rich with sticky psychological subtleties, require a certain amount of opportunism. And as Williamson teaches us, opportunism is the entrepreneurial skill par excellence.1 The concern with “keeping in touch,” with “being around” (that is, eternally available), with “seizing the unexpected opportunity” is a general feature of a form of socialization that takes place before and between jobs. Here, an important hypothesis suggests itself: the diversification and fragmentation of forms of employment occurs against the backdrop of a substantially unitary socialization process. It is this

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socialization process that the project of political organization needs to grasp, whatever form that project may take. A critique of the illusions related to “self-employment” is possible only if it involves a recognition (and a political evaluation) of the enterpreneurial skills required for surviving on the labor market, the habit of not having any habits, the capacity to metabolize innovation. 2. Professionality This universally applicable little word exemplifies one of the most persistent optical illusions generated by post-Fordism. Reading the results of a recent study on the workers at Rome’s Fiumicino airport, one is struck by how a large number of the younger workers (precisely those most affected by the phenomena of “contingent” and “temporary” employment) attribute great importance to “professionality,” considering it the characteristic most likely to improve their situation. Note that the keyword is professionality, not specialization. The distinction is important. “Specialization” refers to an ensemble of pre-defined tasks that require a certain level (sometimes higher, sometimes lower) of technical expertise; it involves apprenticeship and, in some cases, academic studies. “Specialization” is something impersonal, an objective requirement that can be evaluated on the basis of socially shared parameters. “Professionality,” on the other hand, is seen as a subjective property, a form of know-how inseparable from the individual person; it is the sum of knowledges, experiences, attitudes, and a certain sensibility. Correctly understood, post-Fordist “professionality” does not correspond to any precise profession. It consists rather of certain character traits. Far from referring to any particular skill, “professionality” is the awkwardly roundabout term by which one refers to the putting-towork of a person’s most generic traits. Starkly put, it’s nothing more nor less than the art of being in the world, of negotiating the most varied situations, of responding to the blows of chance. And it is highly significant that this art of being in the world, transfigured into “professionality,” presents itself as a productive resource. A systematic examination of the most recent manuals for managing “human relations” (Franco Angeli has published many of them, both American and European) would be of decisive importance for the investigation of the spontaneous ideology of professionality. For example, job interviews tend to focus more on the inclinations and habits, the ambitions and “values” of the candidate than on his familiarity with a specific task. The aim, to be sure, is not so much to evaluate the candidate’s capacity for

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subordination as to measure his ability to react in a prompt and welltimed manner to the vicissitudes of the network enterprise, or of just-intime production. As in the case of “self-employment,” the critique of ideology must not eliminate the material reality in which ideology takes root: in the case of “professionality,” it is a question of the integration of the productive role of affect, taste, inclination, and linguistic-relational capacities. 3. Individualism No doubt post-Fordist neo-individualism has numerous causes, many of them complementary. I will refer only to one. The ideology of progress has given way to a pervasive ideology of the possible. The notion of a cumulative and future-oriented time, dramatically promoted by the material organization of Fordism, gives way to a sense of being constantly confronted with a phantasmagoric ensemble of simultaneous opportunities, to be negotiated with flexibility. What seems to come to the fore in this relationship with possibility qua possibility is the individual dimension of experience. It’s certainly true that the “opportunities” that flare up intermittently under post-Fordism are abstract, serial, interchangeable, far from giving rise to a well-structured biography; nonetheless, it remains the case that each of them always presents itself as “my” opportunity, the opportunity of a contingent and unique I. The ideology of the possible has its real basis in the fluid relationship between labor and non-labor—in the sudden shift to different tasks, the necessity of adapting oneself to continuous innovation, the changed experience of social time, the decline of the “community of producers,” and the prevalence of the aleatory over the pre-determined. (By the way: it would be appropriate, at some point, to conduct a comparative investigation into the emergence of post-Fordism and the spread of game shows in Italy.) The link between individualism and the cult of the possible has found an apologetic but efficacious representation in “weak thought” and its various derivatives.2 The surplus of postmodern theories needs to be seen as something more (and worse) than a case of bad writing. It registers an important transformation with the precision of a seismograph, but presents that transformation as a beneficial and liberatory development. It’s certainly not a question of negating or condemning “neoindividualism.” Rather, one would have to see in it a symptom that is not so despicable, all told: a heightened sensitivity to what is unique and irreproducible in the life of the individual. The very notion of the “public

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sphere” would merit re-conceptualization with regard to this sensibility. And what is more, Marx once spoke, in an oxymoron that is more than a little suggestive, of the “social individual” (that is, of an individual whose singularity is not attenuated, but heightened and rendered more sophisticated by collective experience) as the powerful basis of communist subversion. Translated by Max Henninger Notes 1. Virno is referring to Oliver Williamson, a contemporary economist known for his work in transaction cost analysis and his theory of the negotiation and modification of contractual agreements. See Oliver Williamson, Markets and Hierarchies (New York: The Free Press, 1975). (Translator’s note.) 2. The expression “weak thought” [pensiero debole] was coined by contemporary Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo. “Weak thought” is Vattimo’s term for a post-Enlightenment, post-logocentric, and post-Marxist philosophical approach that has lost all faith in the grand narratives of modernity. “Weak thought” might be seen as a specifically Italian version of what commonly goes by the name of “postmodernism.” See Pier Aldo Rovatti and Gianni Vattimo (eds.), Il pensiero debole (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1983). (Translator’s note.)

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Introduction to Antonio Negri’s

“Art and Culture in the Age of Empire and the Time of the Multitudes” One of the founding fathers of Italian “workerism,” Antonio Negri was associated with the Marxist extra-parliamentary organization Potere operaio [Workers’ Power] during the 1960s and with the Italian autonomist movement during the 1970s. He was imprisoned on political charges from 1979 to 1983 and from 1997 to 2003. Between 1983 and 1997, Negri lived in exile in Paris, where he continues to hold a university lectureship. In the Anglophone world, Negri is best known for his collaborative work with Michael Hardt, in particular for their theory of capitalist globalization, developed in Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000) and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (London and New York: Penguin Press, 2004). “Empire” is the term coined by Negri and Hardt to describe the flexible, transnational form of sovereignty that develops contemporarily with the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism. Hardt and Negri re-introduce the concept of the “multitude”—taken from the seventeenth-century political philosophy of Hobbes, Spinoza, and others—in order to designate the collective subject that labors and struggles under Empire’s global regime of exploitation. In exploring the transformations of art and culture in the age of Empire, the essay translated below touches on many of the central themes of Negri’s recent work. A prime example of Negri’s capacity for theoretical synthesis, the essay surveys the economic, political, and cultural developments of the past decades in order to trace them to the anthropological and ontological transformation that accompanies the transition from the system of Fordist nation-states to Empire. Negri invokes a wide range of conceptual apparatuses—from Spinoza’s ontology to the theory of space developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus – in order to reverse Adorno and Horkheimer’s vision of capital’s all-encompassing dominion and to argue for the autonomy and creativity of the multitude. Max Henninger, translator

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Art and Culture in the Age of Empire and the Time of the Multitudes Antonio Negri 1. The critique of culture frequently repeats itself. Does it do so rightly or wrongly, with regard to our present situation? When, in 1947, at the end of the Second World War, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno published Dialectic of Enlightenment, a new critical model emerged, as singular as it was reproducible, both different and capable of being repeated. Reflecting upon the Europe devastated by fascism they had left behind and upon the American society that had taken them in as exiles, Adorno and Horkheimer considered the Enlightenment’s tendency to transform itself into its own opposite, not only into the open barbarism of fascism but also into the totalitarian subjection of the masses effected by the new seductions of the culture industry. European fascism and American commodification were treated as co-extensive. From then (the end of the Second World War) until today, that judgement on Western culture has been confirmed by the gradual constitution of Empire. The transformation of fascism into the commodification of culture was realized with unbroken continuity, spreading across the entire face of the planet as the systems of telecommunication became its main instrument of diffusion... The retouching of images was followed by the universal prostitution of tourism, and by a thousand other varieties of bad taste. Watch Murdoch’s television and you’ll find proof that Adorno’s model of cultural criticism genuinely uncovered the ontology of the new world. The restructuring of this world into fascism, its reconstruction by means of war, its corruption through degrading imagery: no doubt all of this is proliferating exponentially today... Now television has become interactive, producing trash culture and constructing an appropriate audience! Musical culture demands new trash productions and the circle closes perfectly. The neutralization of information follows the same laws as the levelling of affect: if the romantic and the classic have both been reduced to signs without sense, truth is now either imposed or vulgar. Adorno’s model has exhausted itself: whatever innovative elements its critique of culture may have contained at the end of the Second World War have become banal. Indignation is no longer possible. It is at this point, then, that the critique of culture necessarily becomes repetitive.

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Within and against this infernal machine, which globalizes culture at the very same time that it ravages and perverts its values, there is always a ghost, an insurgent spirit. Yet while the circuit of cultural communication is perfect and self-sufficient, this spirit can only proceed by nourishing itself on things extraneous and other: bodily desire, the freedom of the multitudes, the power of languages. In the horrible abstraction of telematic communication, something subjectivates itself: the spirit of the multitude. In a world of perverted signs, someone produces simple signs of truth: look at Basquiat, his infantile signs and utopian descriptions... Production has become linguistic; consequently, subjectivity now presents itself through language itself. The abstraction of communication becomes the body of singularities... Thus the multitude is born. 2. TV seeks to reconstruct the visible world in the image of the boss or of the command function in general. It is downwardly interactive: dominating, disintegrating, and finally producing that which lies below it. Wars are recounted in languages that range from the obfuscation of reality to the narration of global fantasies. The documentation of war becomes a video game. And yet, when the multitude discovers itself within the neutralization of life, the whole sordid construction collapses in a shambles. It began in Vietnam, the multitudinous disintegration of truth as recounted by power: a few photographers and the occasional philosophically-minded soldier were enough to reveal the blood and tears with which that war was rife. Since then the mechanisms of demystification and the capacity to seize the world in its live immediacy have become viruses that proliferate as violently as an epidemic. Consider Genoa, where, during the anti-G-8 demonstrations, the police perfected their low-intensity warfare against peaceful demonstrators, accusing them—via the means of communication—of being gangs of thugs. In vain: it turned out that the multitude possessed more cameras than the police, infinitely more; the image of the policeman-assassin became familiar to every household... The multitude rebelled by means of its own capacity to produce images, rendering rebellious the abstraction of signs. No longer was it possible to transform the world merely by interpreting it: the last philosophical project, appropriated by those experts of communication Adorno would have defined as fascists, was no longer viable. In the words of a certain bearded old man: the only possible interpretation of the world consisted in its transformation.

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If this is the point at which we have arrived, then the Dialectic of Enlightenment has finally exhausted itself, extinguished in the capitalist production of repetitive images (“history is over”) and replaced by the new production of desire. The very abstraction that was commodified has now perhaps been redeemed, thanks to the initiative of the multitudes. Farewell Adorno, farewell to the realism and repetitiveness of the modern critical model: here the critique of culture establishes itself on a new terrain, that of the multitude and of postmodernity. Perhaps the multitude no longer produces a utopia, but rather a dis-ustopia: the capacity to remain within, to hollow out language from inside and make the material desire for transformation emerge. 3. The dis-utopia of the multitudes does not exist abstractly, but, rather, biopolitically. This means that culture now reveals itself in forms that are structurally dense and alive. To speak of biopolitics is to consider command and violence from below—that is, from a point of view opposed to that of biopower. And yet there is no possibility here of identifying a dialectic of the high and the low, or of an opposition between the high and the low. The multitude is an ensemble of proliferating singularities, capable of expressing new linguistic determinations. In its classic form, the dialectic leads back to the One, but this new dialectic is chaotic – the multitudes are ensembles of atoms that meet in accordance with ever untimely and exceptional clinamena. There is therefore no dialectic in the sense of an opposition between living within the structures of biopower, on the one hand, and freely and antagonistically travelling them as biopolitical subjects, on the other. The only problem that concerns us today, when we consider the new cultural determinations in imperial space, is that of seizing the moment of intersection, the determination of the event, the innovations that traverse the chaotic ensemble of the multitude. It’s a matter of understanding when biopolitical expression triumphs over the expression of biopower. There are neither syntheses nor Aufhebungen; there are only oppositions, varied expressions, multiplicities of linguistic tensions that escape in every direction. The passage from modernity to postmodernity is characterized by the immeasurability that postmodernity introduces: an immeasurability that marks the end of all criteria of measure proposed and imposed by modern rationalism. The measure and instrumental reason that presented themselves spontaneously during the golden age of modernity (between humanism and Descartes), that were expressed as the metaphysical synthesis of an ordered world in its silver age, between

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Hegel and Bergson, and that were brought to bear with the violence of Weberian instrumental reason and Keynesian planning in its bronze age—this measure and this rationality are at an end. It’s not straightforwardly true any more that poetry has become impossible after Auschwitz, as Adorno claimed, just as it’s no longer straightforwardly true that all hope has perished after Hiroshima, as Günther Anders asserted; poetry and hope have been revitalized by the postmodern multitudes, yet their measure is no longer homogeneous with that of the poetry and the hope of modernity. What, then, is the new cultural canon of postmodernity? We don’t know, nor is it clear that there has to be one. What we know is that this great transformation is taking place within life, and that it is within life that it finds new figures of expression: figures without measure, formal immeasurabilities— monsters. 4. Postmodern innovation is therefore monstrous. This monstrosity has two characteristics: its being without measure and its immeasurable becoming-ontological. Let us begin, then, to speak of the monster by considering these two characteristics in detail. And let us begin with its becoming-ontological. As suggested above, the living expressions of the new culture are not born as syntheses but as events, as untimeliness; they take shape within a geneaology of vital elements that constitute radical innovations and forms of immeasurability. In tracing this new expressive force of postmodernity, some contemporary philosophers have attempted to qualify it: Lacan already foregrounded the absence of measure characteristic of the new and of art, and of signifiers in general; in Derrida the productivity of the margin searches out new forms of order, disseminating itself; in one way or another, Nancy and Agamben harvest these fields of the extreme limit... Nothing in any of these authors positively qualifies the monstrosity of innovation, and yet there is in their work the acute sense and the intensity of ontological exasperation. The more unproductive and absent they are, the more the new forms reveal themselves, gliding into being. They immerse themselves or drown themselves in it. They seek to live and breathe in its shifting sands. Ultimately, what these authors fail to perceive is that this material into which they have chosen to venture is the clay from which new worlds are molded. The ontological dimension does not find its limit on the edge of nothingness, but lives off the constitutive capacity of the people who act on that impossible margin, daringly and without any alternative. The ontological dimension does not entrust itself to the command of an

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ever-more parasitic capital, but develops on the basis of the multitudinous intellectuality of immaterial laborers, mobile, flexible, working under precarious conditions, desperate to be. The ontological dimension emerges from a series of paradoxes: the feminization of labor, the conjunction of reason and affect in production. And we could go on, endlessly defining this ambivalent but radical ontological condition that always implies the situation of those who are living through the passage from modernity to postmodernity. The monster is born within the ontological dimension. But the second characteristic of this ontological dimension of innovative chaos consists precisely in the absence of measure. The monster is the absence of measure, or perhaps new measure – but who can define the negative and the positive, exodus and constituent capacity, from within the transition? During the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, scientists searched out deformities, which intrigued them in their investigation of nature, and kings collected those deformities in their chambers of horrors. But look closely: for them, immeasurability was the apology of measure; like the sublime, the horrible restores within the soul the desire for order. How many three-headed chickens, how many Siamese twins or androgynous fetuses, how many physical distortions and deformities were collected in those museums of the extraordinary and of anatomical deviation. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire has left us historical encyclopedias of the anomalies of natural organization, even attempts to determine the laws and the causes of the monstrosities and natural defects of the various ages. There was even a name for it all: teratology. It’s clear that the new, postmodern form of monstrosity is not teratological. It’s simply life expressing itself differently; it’s the hybridity that the singular machines for existing within chaos desire to construct between human and animal species; it’s the hope for and the choice of a life that is not hierarchically ordered or prefigured by forms of measure. Like much of ancient philosophy before him (at least the part of it consigned to tradition), Aristotle’s version of the origin of being is also its order and its measure; Aristotle tells us that the arché is both first principle and command. This eugenics was taken up again in that modernity that sought legitimization for its stylistic principles in antiquity. To gesture towards the monster is to negate both classical and modern eugenics, to display an ontological process that has abandoned essence as principle or point of departure. Perhaps this new journey leads us into gloomy regions and perhaps our sense of direction is sometimes confused; but it is this process of travelling with unanswered questions, it is this lack of an ordered and measured origin that we must champion. It’s a tension

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that unhinges every precept; not only every precept but also every prefiguration; not only every prefiguration but also every unitary matrix, whether spatial or temporal; and it’s here, in the midst of being, that a convulsive creativity takes hold... not genealogies of vanguards, but the concrete history of multitudes of singularities, anthropological monstrosities. Where a forest is burned down, the earth becomes fertile. They’ve set fire to the forest (but it’s moving), and we’re returning— savage, free as birds—to inhabit a new nature. 5. The dimensions of globalization are close to immeasurable. In any case the world no longer has an “outside”—neither an outside nor a precedent. Consider the development of cultural anthropology: at its center there was European man, and it had two outsides: the primitive and the native or barbarian—that is, an anthropological precedent and a political outside. European man was the central point, surrounded by the rest of civilization. The market and the various aesthetic models, money and the habitat, Welt and Umwelt: history was geared to the monopoly of European man—whoever came first was primitive; whoever was dominated by European man was a barbarian or a native. But if, with globalization, human space no longer knows multiple limits but only one limit—its external circumference—then once this limit is reached, every subsequent expression can only be directed inward. There is a line of continuity that gives meaning to this greatest possible expansion of self-reflection; it’s without doubt the final Prometheanism, the final universalism of bourgeois culture, but perhaps it could also be defined as the first determination of a liberated humanity’s Gattungswesen. All of history before globalization has led us to this limit: it wanted to mark the range of Western culture’s dominion, but at the same time it reveals the greatest possible (and frequently monstrous) effect of a process of contradictions and struggles, of the genealogy of a subject that intends to be uncontainable but finds itself right there, within those limits. The world scene is therefore not simply a horizon: it’s a genuine scenography, and the props (post-Ballets russes) have become part of the drama. The world scene is both unlimited and finite; it lives off this monstrous confrontation. On this scene, the end of history can be declared just as well as its full realization. It is by corroborating this paradox (affirmatively or negatively) that a work achieves aesthetic significance. The world has become both enormous and very small; we’re in a situation worthy of Pascal. But there is no longer any God. The space is smooth and superficial; the immanence of value entrusts itself only to the works of men. What does it mean to be an artist in this situation?

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6. What does it mean to make the monster act on the new world scene? It means watching it act within a process of anthropological metamorphosis; it means identifying it in mutation. This mutation is spatial, as we’ve seen, but it’s also temporal: it’s within time that the end of history realizes itself, once Western bourgeois civilization has reached the world’s edge. The spatial synthesis of “here” and “the world” intends to absorb the temporal one of “now” and “the infinite.” The anthropological metamorphosis plays out around these paradoxical ensembles. This is what postmodernity is: a grand narrative that is entirely monstrous... In fact the flesh of human events fails to be enclosed in the unity of space and time required for narration. Flesh does not become body. It overflows artistic expression on all sides, just as it spills over every boundary of global events. Tremendous passions run through this incapacity of flesh to become body. Once, during the great epoch that preceded 1968, this incapacity was lived as an opening towards utopia: the literary and aesthetic avant-gardes had to create utopia. The end of the world drew closer, to the extent that utopia swirled around the extreme capacity of collective praxis to construct reality. The objective, the masterpiece, was the Apocalypse, just as it was for the great pre-Christian authors... Yet in postmodernity—here, in our own time— it’s no longer possible to be prophetic. We reflect on the Apocalypse without being prophetic; we speak of vanguards without being utopian: the world has become complete; all attention is directed inward; the escape routes have been blocked. The only possibility left for us is that of changing the world from within. The slogan “Another world is possible” implies an exodus that leads to ourselves. Every time the limit is reached (and it’s a limit without a beyond, one that cannot be surpassed), we cannot but redirect our attention onto the present kairòs... But what is the kairòs? In Greek culture it was the moment in time marked by the flight of the arrow: that was a civilization that still envisioned a future, and hence a relationship between releasing the arrow and seeing it arrive. The arrow launched into the sky could reach the stars. Here, however, the kairòs is the arrow that strikes our own heart, the arrow that returns from the stellar limit. Kairòs is the necessity (but also the possibility) of taking ourselves as the starting point of a creative project. It’s the possibility of transforming our bodies, not just of rendering them hybrid by an interaction with the outside world, but of constructing them and rendering them hybrid from within. It’s the possibility of engaging in politics by leading all the elements of life back to a poetic reconstruction. The very term “biopolitics” implies this constitutive project. In short,

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when we live under globalization, when we live in a world whose boundaries are insuperable, when the Copernican revolution has definitively exhausted itself and Ptolemy and the centrality of the kairòs have become the only reference point, when all this is the case, what does it mean to develop the creative and constitutive spirit of artistic practice? When the only possibility for action, artistic and ethical, consists in moving out from within being, through biopolitical practice, such that every making is a transformation of the very physical and spiritual essence of the human body; when the structure of the social has become so central and the world so small and restricted that there is no longer any possibility of leaving this habitat behind, when utopian illusions (illusions of other topoi) no longer present themselves; what, then, does it mean to act artistically? It means constructing new being; it means making global space reflect back on itself, re-directing it towards the existence of singularities. Will this mean acting to eliminate death, to dissolve the internal limits of the global machine? The monster promises us nothing less. 7. The multitude is the only subject that can pose death this creative challenge. The multitude is an ensemble of singularities, but each singularity is also an ensemble of multitudes. The multitude is an ensemble of bodies, but each body is a multitude of bodies. This machine struggles for life; it struggles within life and against death. The practice of the multitude is nothing but this constant proliferation of vital experiences that have in common the negation of death, the rejection and definitive refusal of that which stalls the life process. The global world as we know it, as Empire presents it to us in the political order, is a closed world, subject to the entropy that results when space and time have been exhausted. But the multitude that acts within this closed world has learned to transform it, by passing through each subject and towards each singularity making up the world. Foucault once said that when we thought history was over, we find that it renews itself on the vertical axis that we are. That is what’s happening to us, as multitude and multitudinous body. Only within our own transformation, in a ferocious struggle against death, can the practice of the multitude begin. This, it seems to me, is the meaning of art in the age of Empire and during the time of the multitudes. Translated by Max Henninger

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Introduction to Franco Berardi (Bifo)’s

“Technology and Knowledge in a Universe of Indetermination” This is the sixth chapter of the book La nefasta utopia di Potere Operaio [The Nefarious Utopia of Potere Operaio], published by Franco Berardi “Bifo” in 1998. The title of the book is to be understood ironically, since it is borrowed from an article by Giorgio Bocca, a leading Italian journalist considered one of the best-known exponents of moderate-centrist public opinion. In his article, which appeared in La Repubblica in 1979, Bocca described the group Potere Operaio as one of the main links in the chain that, in his opinion, had led young Italian leftists from the movements of 1968 to the terrorist groups of the 1970s.1 Franco Berardi (1950 - ), who has used the pseudonym “Bifo” since middle school to sign both his artistic and his politico-cultural works, was himself a member of Potere Operaio from 1969 to 1971. Berardi grew up in Bologna, where he was a student of aesthetics, and published his first book, Contro il lavoro [Against Work] in 1975. After having left Potere Operaio, Berardi became one of the leaders of Autonomia Organizzata and founded the cultural-political magazine A/traverso. In 1976 he was one of the organizers of Radio Alice, the first creative, politically oriented “free radio station” in Italy. When the radio station was closed by the police in 1977, and he himself was accused of subversive activities, Berardi escaped to France, where he was befriended by Félix Guattari, whose work he had known since the very early 1970s. After several years of traveling, Berardi came back to Bologna in 1985. Over the past twenty years, he has continued to animate different creative, political and cultural projects, and has published several books. Here I will mention his collaboration with Semiotext[e], his on-going research on new information technologies, and the “Telestreet” group, which, as a reaction to the monopoly exerted by Silvio Berlusconi on the Italian media, broadcasted independent television programming first in Bologna and then in numerous Italian cities from 2001 to 2004. Among his later publications are Cyberpunk e mutazione (1993), Cibernauti (1995) and Félix (2001), an intellectual biography of the late Félix Guattari. A book chronicling the history of Telestreet, entitled Telestreet: macchina immaginativa non-omologata, appeared in February 2006. Berardi and his two co-authors for this book have been sued for defamation by the president of Mediaset, the Berlusconi-owned media giant. 56

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In the text that follows, Berardi articulates a truly remarkable synthesis of the most important themes in post-workerist Italian thought. In the first part of his argument, Berardi explains how the Marxist-Leninist heritage, which dominated the Italian communist left during the 1960s and 1970s, was incapable of understanding the profound mutations of late-capitalist society. Hans Jürgen Krahl is remembered here as one of the first critics of traditional Marxist theory. According to Berardi, the increasingly “mental”—others would say “immaterial”— nature of work in post-industrial societies renders obsolete the Marxist definitions of work and of political struggle. In order to formulate a critique of the latest developments of capitalism, Berardi considers earlier theories of the relation between technology and political power, notably Marcuse’s critique of “one dimensional Man.” He then analyzes the contribution of North American theorists of the capitalist economy, like Peter Drucker, and of virtual communication, like Arthur Kroker and Michael Weinstein. In the last pages of the text, Berardi explains the theory of Exodus as the only alternative left to fight the control exerted by capital over technological discoveries and imaginative potentialities, an alternative that implies a constant struggle to be waged in late capitalist development—that is, the construction of subjectivity and affects. Considering that this essay was first published in 1998, when the phenomenon of the World Wide Web was still in its early stages, it is quite stunning to see that Berardi’s analysis has lost none of its timeliness. Giuseppina Mecchia, translator

Technology and Knowledge in a Universe of Indetermination Franco Berardi (Bifo) I. Leninism Cannot Explain the Metropolis Hans Jürgen Krahl died one evening in 1970, in a car accident. He was not yet 30, but he was already one of the most influential thinkers of the German anti-authoritarian movement, which had exploded in the streets in 1967, when, in the course of an anti-imperialist demonstration against the Shah of Iran, a 26 years-old-student, Behnno Onesorg, had been killed by the police. The movement had spread rapidly among the students, who were fighting for the democratization of German society 57 SubStance #112, Vol. 36, no. 1, 2007

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while protesting against the Vietnam War and denouncing, sometimes with clamorous activities, the media intoxication produced by the newspapers belonging to the Springer group. The German movement—which at the time was mostly organized within the SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, German Socialist Student League)—was split, from the very beginning, between two theoretical poles, one believing in centralized organization and the other promoting “spontaneous” action. The first pole would give birth, in the following years, to the Marxist-Leninist Rote Zellen, while the latter would animate the multifaceted experiences of the youth movement, from the Jugendzentren to the Autonomen collectives. In the two years before his death, Hans Jürgen Krahl had been elaborating the foundations of a postLeninist revolutionary theory. The situation of those years has been described by his collaborators in their introduction to a collection of Krahl’s essays entitled Constitution and Class Struggle.2 The impossibility of making a systematic elaboration of the theoretical problems raised by Krahl is not due entirely to his death; rather, the unfinished state of his work is the direct expression of a political situation where the traditional theories concerning workerist movements were being contradicted by praxis, but still in the absence of an adequately elaborated theory of revolutionary movements in late-capitalist metropolitan environments.3

In this book, composed of dense philosophical fragments, Krahl questions the possibility of reducing the new social composition of intellectualized labor to the political and organizational categories of traditional workerist movements, starting from the thought of the Frankfurt School, and of Adorno in particular, and anchoring its critique in the praxis of alienated labor and of anti-authoritarian struggles: The traditional theories of class consciousness, especially the ones derived from Lenin, tend to separate class consciousness from its economic elements. They neglect the meta-economic, constitutive role played by productive subjectivity in the creation of wealth and civilization. 4

The analytic separation between the sphere of economics and the sphere of consciousness, which remains valid when productive labor is structurally separated from intellectual labor, tends to lose its meaning when intellectual work becomes a constitutive element of the general production process. Consequently, “the reduction of production to economic elements is a bad feature of the capitalist mode of production.” Production cannot be considered as a purely economic process solely SubStance #112, Vol. 36, no. 1, 2007

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determined by the laws of supply and demand: other, extra-economic factors contribute to it, and they become all the more decisive with the progressive intellectualization of the production cycle. Social culture, contrasting imaginations, expectations and disappointments, hate and loneliness: all these elements modify the rhythm and the fluidity of the production process. The emotional, the ideological, and the linguistic spheres influence social productivity. And this becomes clearer when emotional, linguistic, and creative energies are increasingly involved in the production of value. Hans Jürgen Krahl was able to anticipate all of these developments— and the innovative content of the changes in production characteristic of these last decades, which have seen the obsolescence of the industrial model—at the conceptual level, following the threads of a reflection fully contained within the abstract categories of critical Marxism: Working time remains the measure of value even when it no longer includes the qualitative extension of production. Science and technology make possible the maximization of our labor capacity, transforming it into a social combination that, in the course of the capitalist development of machinery, increasingly becomes the main productive force.5

In his Theses on the General Relation Between the Scientific Intelligensia and Proletarian Class Consciousness, which appeared in 1969 in the journal Sozialistische Korrespondenz-Info, Krahl reflects on an issue that occupies a pivotal place in the political problematic of the movement. This central issue is technology, understood as the specific form of the relation between science and labor processes: The technological translation of science into a system of mechanisms constituting a fixed capital—which has been systematically implemented since the end of the nineteenth century—and the tendency towards automation have changed what Marx called the real subsumption of labor under capital. The real subsumption is different from a purely formal one because it modifies qualitatively even the technological structure of the immediate labor process. This happens through the systematic application of the social forces of production and the separation between labor and science. The labor process then, understood as the organic exchange between man and nature, is socialized in itself. One of the most remarkable traits of the real subsumption of labor by capital is, as Marx said, “the conscious application of science, which is a general product of social development, to the immediate process of production.” Social combination makes production increasingly scientific, thereby constituting it as a totality, as a “total” worker, but at the same time reducing the working ability of the single individual to a simple moment. […]

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The application of science and technology to the process of production has arrived at such a level of development that it threatens to explode the system. It has caused such a socialization of productive labor that it can no longer tolerate the objectified form of work imposed by capital.6

These analytic considerations necessarily lead the young theoretician to raise a decisive question, radically challenging the organizational modalities and the political projects of twentieth-century worker movements, which the anti-authoritarian groups of the 1960s had shaken without being able to break away from them: The absence of a reflection about the theoretical construction of class consciousness as a non-empirical category […] had the consequence, within the socialist movement, of reducing the concept of class consciousness to its Leninist meaning, which is inadequate to the metropolis.7

Leninism, as an organizational model and an understanding of the relation between social consciousness and the totality of the labor process, is inadequate when dealing with the metropolitan condition. Leninism is founded on the separation between the labor process and higher activities of knowledge (consciousness). This separation is grounded in the proto-industrial work form, and is valid as long as the worker knows his job without having any awareness of the system of knowledge structuring society. The basis for this distinction, though, becomes increasingly fragile when the mass-worker takes shape on the social scene, because the mass-worker, forced into an increasingly repetitive and fragmented activity, develops his sociality in an immediately subversive, anti-capitalistic dimension. Finally, this separation becomes completely unfounded when we start talking about the mental nature of social labor, where the single, intellectualized operators become the bearers of a specific knowledge and develop a perception—tormented, tortuous, and fragmentary, to be sure—of the social system of knowledge traversing the totality of the productive cycle. II. Technology and One-Dimensional Thought During those years, Marcuse was also considering the problem of the relation between forms of thought and social production. The teleology of technology in the productive sphere ends up enslaving the thought process from the viewpoint of its very epistemological structures:

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The feature of operationalism – to make the concept synonymous with the corresponding set of operations – recurs in the linguistic tendency “to consider the names of things as being indicative at the same time of their manner of functioning, and the names of properties and processes as symbolical of the apparatus used to detect or produce them.”8

From this point of view, Marcuse also says that “the totalitarian universe of technological rationality is the latest transmutation of the idea of Reason.”9 This totalitarian twisting of the idea of Reason acts in such a way that it closes the human perspective in two directions: the one-dimensional reduction of reason to its operational and functional form reduces to a single dimension society’s possibilities for thought and imagination. On the other hand, technology itself is flattened out, so that it is no longer a field open to experimentation and creativity on the part of society, but an activity having only one possible dimension of development: the capitalist one, which has been subjected to the restricted functionality of a profit-based economy. In another book, Eros and Civilization, which was published in Italy in the same period, Marcuse developed the theme of technology’s liberating potentialities, but it is in One-Dimensional Man that he denounced the reduction of these potentialities by functionalism. Marcuse opposes the dialectics of a self-realizing reason to the functionalist reduction. His point of view remains idealist, and in his thought there is no reference whatsoever to the concrete process of social re-composition; nonetheless, he seizes on an essential trait of late-capitalist development: Dialectic thought conceives the dialectic between “is” and “ought” first as an ontological condition, pertaining to the structure of Being itself. However, the recognition of this State of Being—its theory— intends from the beginning a concrete practice. Seen in the light of a truth which appears in them falsified or denied, the given facts themselves appear false and negative. Consequently, thought is led, by the situation of its objects, to measure their truth in terms of another logic, another universe of discourse.10

Marcuse’s book describes the tendency toward the full integration of Logos and production through the use of technology. The horizon of this trend is the digitalization of the world: a digitalization that becomes the paradoxical realization of Hegelian pan-logism, in its a-dialectical, de-potentialized, pacified version. The incessant dynamic of technical progress has become permeated with political content, and the Logos of technics has been made into the Logos of continued servitude. The liberating force of technology

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– the instrumentalization of things – turns into a fetter of liberation; the instrumentalization of Man.11

The use of algorithms in the process of production and its transmission within the logical machinery crystallizes a certain kind of rationality, its operational form. But in this manner the world is subsumed (reversing Hegel) under its logical-digital reduction, and thereby it is forever stuck in the capitalist form incorporated into technical Reason: “Technology has become the great vehicle of reification – reification in its most mature and effective form.”12 III. Work, Action, Thought. Exodus and Networks In a beautiful essay entitled “Virtuosity and Revolution (The Political Theory of Exodus)”, Paolo Virno raises the issue of work in its most radical terms, thereby tackling directly the distinction between work and action. Marx distinguishes between work and action in the first page of Capital. But today, Virno says, the distinction becomes difficult, having been erased or maybe absorbed by the transformations undergone by work: “Nothing appears as enigmatic today as the question of what it means to act.”13 How can we define action? Virno asks. According to two boundaries, he answers: “The first relates to labor, to its taciturn and instrumental character, to that automatism that makes of it a repetitive and predictable process. The second relates to pure thought, to its solitary and invisible nature.”14 But these two boundaries are confused today, when the field of action overlaps with the space of work and work overlaps with intellectual activity: “Work has absorbed the distinctive traits of political action, and this annexation has been made possible by the intermeshing between modern forms of production and an Intellect that has become public.”15 On the other hand, the distinction between working and political activity is lost – not only, as Virno remarks, because of the increasing bureaucratization of politics (which was observed long ago), but also (and most importantly) because the post-Fordist labor process is essentially an elaboration and transmission of information, a communicative manipulation of the relationship to other people and therefore, finally, a political activity. The assimilation of work into action has made the latter less desirable, says Virno, but at the same time we need to recognize that the condition of labor has become more desirable, precisely because of an increasingly mental labor cycle. Today, the identity formation of the worker is helped by the fact that his or her

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communicative abilities are involved in the productive processes, that his or her individuality is seen as an ability to act. Nonetheless, it is also true that this is also a formidable impoverishment, because what is at work here is the submission of the singular qualities of the person to the economic semiotization that is now the paradigmatic rule of capitalism. What other meaning can we give to the capitalist slogan of “total quality” if not the attempt to set to work all those aspects that traditionally it has shut out of work – in other words, the ability to communicate and the taste for action? And how is it possible to include in the productive process the entire experience of the single individual, except by committing her or him to a sequence of variations on the theme, of performances? Such a sequence, in parody of self-realization, represents the true acme of subjugation. There is none so poor as the one who sees his or her relation to others, his or her own possession of language, reduced to waged labor.16

The category of alienation, which describes the forms of industrial labor had brought about the estrangement of the worker from his or her work and therefore the possibility of autonomy. The detached gaze of the worker on the productive process was in fact a positive, creative factor, which is now lost in the organic-inorganic continuum of the integrated cycle of production. According to Jean Baudrillard, this situation poses a new question: Am I a man or a machine? In the relation with the traditional machines this ambiguity didn’t exist. The worker was always foreign to the machine and therefore alienated in it. As a man, he maintained his precious quality of externality. The new technologies, instead, the images, the interactive screens, live with me as if in an integrated circuit. Video, television, computers, networks: these are contact lenses, transparent prostheses which are integrated to the body to such an extent that they become a genetic part of it.17

The human body and mind are caught in a permanent circuit of electrocution; they are now part of an integrated circulation of information. The horizon for Virno’s call to an action that could be autonomous with regard to the reigning paradigm is Exodus, that is, the constitution of a public sphere that would not intersect the plane of consistency of the capitalist economic sphere and that would not be subjected to its rules: The key to political action […] consists in developing the public nature of Intellect outside of Work, and in opposition to it. […] I use

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the terms Exodus here to define mass defection from the State, the alliance between general intellect and political action, and the movement of the Intellect toward the public sphere.18

Exodus happens through the constitution of a parallel plane of communication, which is independent because it does not interact any longer with the logic of economics. The trend indicated by Virno in the metaphor of Exodus is all but a utopia, and in fact we see it operate through the constitution of the Net (if we consider it as a connective model that has found in the proliferation of the Internet its best known, but not its sole, configuration).19 What are the characteristics of the Net? First of all, the Net is a place where communicative action establishes its own plane of meaning. There is no world pre-existing the moment of communication. There is no coextensive world. Every interruption in communication corresponds to the turn-off of that particular public world. Secondly, the Net is a circuit where the contents of the exchange – messages, products, the objects of the public sphere – can go from one point to another without passing through any center, and without constituting an area of belonging. Finally, in the Net the agents don’t bear an identity, or rather, it is a place where identity and the flow of enunciation don’t necessarily coincide. Let us not talk about the Internet, and all the time that it makes us waste looking at a screen that flashes mostly useless data at us. I am not interested in talking about the Internet, but about the Net, that is, the paradigmatic model that it implies. The Internet is only a laboratory for experimenting ways of communicating that will become ever more concrete, involving, and fast. The Internet will assume unforeseeable characteristics, tied to various possibilities: it might connect to television and thereby to the transmission of presence; it will plug into virtual Reality and the production of immersive worlds of experience; or, maybe, it will become a supermarket. In any case, this will not prevent the model of the Net from producing new forms of social relationships. Still, the current transformation of the Internet shows a first crystallization of the Exodus described by Virno. And this crystallization is disquieting. Arthur Kroker, a Marxist critic from Canada, talks about the formation of a virtual class in the course of the transformation of the Internet into an Infobahn. The construction of the Infobahn by the big multinationals involved in the production of network software, the telephone companies, and the technocratic nation states introduces into the living body of planetary communication a structure which predetermines statistically average paths of navigation. At the same time, the virtual class segregates itself, isolating its sphere of activity from the social life of the majority of humanity. A small percentage of human beings enclose themselves in a pressurized cabin which will allow SubStance #112, Vol. 36, no. 1, 2007

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them to come into contact with 200 million of their peers, while the other six billion are left to drown in the nightmare of a concrete relation deprived of any intelligence, of any public dimension. Concrete humanity becomes residual, while the decision processes are all absorbed in an inaccessible circuit: “The information highway is the antithesis of the web, in much the same way as the virtual class needs to destroy the public dimension of the Internet for its own survival.”20 The construction of an autonomous public sphere loses, at this point, its most significant characteristics: […] now that the cybernetic grid is firmly in control, the virtual class must move to liquidate the Internet. It is an old scenario, repeated this time in virtual form. Marx understood this first: every technology releases opposing possibilities towards emancipation and domination.21

Kroker ’s and Weinstein’s essential intuition is precisely the contradiction between data and meaning. The Net represents a circuit of collective and interactive search for a constantly redefined social meaning. The Infobahn, instead, is the backbone of a system in which meaning has to be eliminated because it slows down data circulation: Cyber-activity is, however, the opposite of social relation. The human presence is reduced to a twitching finger, spastic body, and an oversaturated informational pump that surfs the channels, and makes choices within strictly programmed limits. What is really “interfaced” by Cablesoft is the soft matter of the brain […]. When knowledge is reduced to information, then consciousness is stripped of its lived connection to history, judgment and experience. What results is the illusion of an expanded knowledge society, and the reality of a virtual knowledge. Knowledge, that is, as a tightly controlled medium of cybernetic exchange, where thought has a disease, and that disease is called information.22

The authors of Data Trash, therefore, consider inevitable the transformation of the system of generalized virtual exchange, which first appeared as the Internet, into a system that perfectly embodies the alienating principle of capitalism. Capitalism is founded on the principle of progressive abstraction: human activity is emptied of its concrete relation to the product, to knowledge, utility, and pleasure. This is how it becomes labor producing exchange value. Exchange value, in fact, is purely and simply crystallized labor time, which is fundamentally indifferent to the concrete quality of any activity. The exchange of signs has to become an abstraction from meaning, pure data transmission, in order to be able to function as a generalized economic exchange system. The signs derived from the info-productive process are separated from the function of exchanging meaningful contents. The exchange of signs between different points shouldn’t contain any residual knowledge, but it needs to become a pure and simple flow of an exchange value reduced SubStance #112, Vol. 36, no. 1, 2007

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to its most absolute abstraction: information. Information has completely replaced meaning. But the emptying out of the sphere of meaning by information, the increasing abstraction of cognitive activities which has followed the abstraction of material production realized by industrial activity, does not happen without consequences. And this is why Kroker and Weinstein see the spread of a strange epidemic, which is already showing its first symptoms: an epidemic of retro-fascism. What is retro-fascism, according to the sociological imagination of Kroker and Weinstein? It is the reaction of a body that has been humiliated and marginalized by the digitalization of every communicative and social form of exchange. This reaction assumes the aspects of demented aggressive behaviors – demented, because intelligence has been entirely subsumed and absorbed under the abstract machine of info-production: Virtual capitalism is perpetually failing behavioral organisms, placing them in a state of permanent insecurity. When virtual capitalism creates insecurity through its perpetual displacements, (recombinant) fascism comes in to mobilize the hatred for existence.23

An existence emptied of all meaning, reduced to a simple reassembling of data, can only inspire hatred in the organisms who are subjected to it by the re-combined abstract machine. Aggressivity against other people’s existence is really a reaction against existence in general, and first of all against our own: […] Capitalism is not yet fully telematic and still has the need for some labor and some fleshly purchases. Enter fascism, which mediates between dying labor, itself constituted by the opposition of the will to live and the will to virtuality, and the abstract cumulative will of capitalism, itself an intermediate form of the will to virtuality.24

Here we re-encounter a question that had already been elaborated by Deleuze and Guattari through the complementary notions of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. In their works, Deleuze and Guattari define universal history as a process of deterritorialization. Capitalism represents the highest and most violent moment in this uninterrupted process. Precisely because it erases history (the history of individuals, communities, places, and activities) capitalism constitutes the universal truth of history. But what is deterritorialization? It is the passage from a coded to a decoded reality, from the recognizable to the opaque. Deterritorialization is the process which uproots the individual from his familiar, territorial, ideological, and professional origins, throwing him into an abstract process of exchange accelerated by technology and communication and now reaching its maximum speed through digitalization. From the very beginning of its development, capital set deterritorializing processes into motion: with the affirmation of SubStance #112, Vol. 36, no. 1, 2007

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industrial society, traditions lose their strength, family ties are weakened, old rituals disappear along with all the forms that we respected and considered sacred. Capital, after having put into question traditional institutions like the family, religious faith, and communal values, is now destroying, in its late-modern plenitude, the political and psychological barriers which had formerly allowed its development: nationality, language, and finally work itself. Now, capital is focused on the pure and simple circulation of digitalized information. But when capital gets to this point, there is nothing that can replace the identities that human beings once found in the family, in religion, in the nation, or in their work. And human beings are not culturally used to not belonging anywhere, to living without an identity. The retrofascism described by Kroker and Weinstein is precisely a reaction against the void caused by the virtual phase of capitalism. This is why just when capital achieved a full dis-identification all sort of archaic, traditional, proto-modern processes of re-identification are unleashed: religious fundamentalism, nationalism, populism… The residual function assigned to the body as a consequence of the digitalization process provokes its desperate rebellion, expressed by a clinging to all forms of traditionalism, of identitarian memories, and finally of aggressive behaviors. The desiring body cannot tolerate being erased, removed, reduced to a simple residue. This is what causes the retro-fascist reaction: the re-emergence of the foreclosed body is both aggressive and self-destructive. And it couldn’t be otherwise, because the virtualization of the social negates any possibility of influencing the essential choices which are made in a sphere that is inaccessible to the physical aspect of sociality. This is why the masses, reduced to a residue, can only tear each other apart in the name of archaic ideals and mindless oppositions. But there is no longer any circulation of concrete intelligence: it has all been absorbed in the virtual circuit. This is why human behavior appears increasingly mad. IV. Cognitive Labor and Info-Production The fundamental political problem of 20th century worker movements has been the conquest of power and the construction of socialism. These two objectives have systematically deflected the productive power of social struggles and creativity. Not only did they deflect it, but they actually used it against itself. Today that orientation has disappeared, not only because the word “socialism” lost all meaning with the fall of the social-authoritarian regimes, but also because the new social and technical composition of productive labor radically SubStance #112, Vol. 36, no. 1, 2007

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modifies the terms of any discussion concerning government and organization. When we talk about the mental nature of the productive process we mean that the functions assigned by governments to the productive processes are subsumed and internalized by them. There is no longer any distinction between processes of social labor and the general governance of society. Of course, there remains the fiction of a political decision, of a political representation, but the actual ability to govern the social processes on the part of the political will can only play an extremely marginal role. It isn’t politics (with all its complicated mechanisms of representation, decision, and sanction) that decides on the fundamental questions arising in the spheres of technology and finance or in the creation of an interface connecting technology, finance, society, languages, and the imaginary. Government is integrated into the circulation of information, if we consider information in its fullest sense, as an algorithm of processes that can be activated by techno-social automatisms. Programming, understood as the elaboration of a software able to analyze, simplify, systematize, and mechanize entire sequences of human work, is at the core of government action, if we call government a function of decision and regulation. Within the process of techno-social elaboration, of software development, we see the configuration of alternatives which have completely disappeared from the scene of political representation and of ideology. According to the user interfaces realized by the programmer, technology can function either as an element of control or as an agent of liberation from work. The political problem is entirely absorbed within the activity of the mental worker, and of the programmer in particular. The problem of the alternative, of a different social use of certain activities, can no longer be detached from the very forms of this activity. The person who works in a machine shop, or on the assembly line, has to separate herself from her workplace if she wants to rediscover the conditions for a political transformation, if she wants to upset the political and technological modes of oppression. This is why, during the protoindustrial era, it was necessary to build a political organization external to the factory and to the working knowledge of the worker. But this is no longer the case when work becomes an activity of coordination, invention, understanding, and programming. In the age of mental labor, the problem of organization and of political action can no longer be separated from the one concerning the paradigms of the productive operation. Software programming reveals the close relation between dependent labor and creative activity; in this case, we observe how the mental

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work of the programmer acquires a political function of transformation within his very way of operating, and not only a productive function of valorization. The two functions can be distinguished in the sphere of project-oriented consciousness, but they live on the same operational plane. The consequence of the increasingly mental nature of social labor is that politics is replaced by an internalized function of social production and becomes a specific and decisive choice between the alternative uses of a certain knowledge, an invention of interfaces situated between crystallized information and social use, between cognitive architecture and an ecology of communication. Obviously, this doesn’t prevent politics from continuing to celebrate its ever more excessive rituals. But these rituals have lost their efficacy; their only consequences are internal to politics itself. But if this is what is happening to politics, what about economics, both as a discipline and as a field defining human activity? Is economics still a science when the determining factors in the economic field are becoming unstable and immaterial, when they seem to elude the quantifying rules which are at the core of economics as a conceptualizing system? Keynes, the post-Keynesians and the neo-classicists alike cast the economy in a model in which a few constants drive the entire machinery. The model we now need would have to see the economy as “ecology,” “environment,” “configuration,” and as composed of several integrative spheres: a “microeconomy” of individuals and firms, especially transnational ones; a “macroeconomy” of national governments; and a world economy. Every earlier economic theory postulated that one such economy totally controls; all others are dependent and “functions.” […] But economic reality now is one of three such economies. […]. None totally controls the other three; none is totally controlled by the others. Yet none is fully independent from the others, either. Such complexity can barely be described. It cannot be analyzed since it allows of no prediction. To give us a functioning economic theory, we thus need a new synthesis that simplifies – but so far there is no sign of it. And if no such synthesis emerges, we might be at the end of economic theory.25

Economics became a science when, with the expansion of capitalism, rules were established as general principles for productive activity and exchange. But if we want these rules to function we must be able to quantify the basic productive act. The time-atom described by Marx is the keystone of modern economics. The ability to quantify the time necessary for the production of a commodity makes possible the regulation of the entire set of economic relations. But when the main element in the global productive cycle is the unforeseeable work of the mind, the unforeseeable work of language, when self-reproducing

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information becomes the universal commodity, it is no longer possible to reduce the totality of exchanges and relations to an economic rule. In any system as complex as the economy of a developed country, the statistically insignificant events, the events at the margin, are likely to be the decisive events, short range at least. By definition they can neither be anticipated nor prevented. Indeed, they cannot always be identified even after they have had their impact.26

Economic science doesn’t seem able to understand the current transition because it is founded on a quantitative and mechanistic paradigm that could comprehend and regulate industrial production, the physical manipulation of mechanical matter, but is unable to explain and regulate the process of immaterial production based on an activity that can’t easily be reduced to quantitative measurements and the repetition of constants: mental activity. Information and communication technologies are disrupting the social and economical mechanisms of the developed countries. The current indicators of traditional macroeconomics are becoming obsolete and of little significance; moreover, the place and function of economics itself as we still see it are put into question. The phenomenon of growth without job creation devalues a whole series of concepts. This is how even the concept of productivity fails to resist the challenge raised by the new realities. With the new technologies, the majority of production costs are determined by research and equipment expenses that actually precede the productive process. Little by little, in digitalized and automated enterprises, production is no longer subjected to the variations concerning the quantity of operational factors. Marginal cost, marginal profits: these bases of neoclassical economic calculations have lost a good part of their meaning. The traditional elements of salary and price calculation are crumbling down.27

Robin’s analysis shows that economic categories can’t explain the majority of the processes that are truly meaningful in our time, and the reason clearly consists in the fact that mental work is not quantifiable like the work performed by an industrial worker. Therefore, the determination of value – the keystone of classical economy both as a science and as daily economic practice – becomes aleatory and indefinable. In Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard wrote: The reality principle corresponded to a certain stage of the law of value. Today the whole system is swamped by indeterminacy, and every reality is absorbed by the hyperreality of the code and simulation. The principle of simulation governs us now, rather than the outdated reality principle. Finalities have disappeared, the models generate us now. […] Capital no longer belongs to the order of political economy: it operates with political economy as its simulated model.28

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With the digitalizing of production, the abstraction of capital makes a qualitative leap. Not only is production an abstract production of value, but the economic indicators are autonomous from the system of production, and are constituted as a synchronic, structural, selfreferential, and autonomous system, independent from the real world. The increasingly financial nature of our economy means exactly this. The stock markets are the places where obsessions, psychological expectations, fears, play, and apocalyptic ideologies regulate the game. Realist economies were governed by their goals, the naïve goal of producing use value for the satisfaction of specific needs, or the subtler goal of valorization as the increase of invested capital. Now, instead, it is impossible to explain our economies on the basis of their goals, whether we identify them with the intentions of certain individuals or certain groups or with the goals of an entire society. The economy is governed by a code, not by its goals: Finality is there in advance, inscribed in the code. We can see that nothing has changed – the order of goals has simply ceded its place to a molecular play, as the order of signifieds has yielded to the play of infinitesimal signifiers, reduced to their aleatory commutation.29

The economy therefore appears as a hyper-reality, a simulated, double, and artificial world that cannot be translated in terms of real production. The mental nature of today’s economy is not only expressed by the technological transformation of the productive process, but by the global code in charge of interpreting the process constituting our entire world. Consequently, the science of economics can no longer explain the fundamental dynamics governing humanity’s productive activities; nor can it explain their crisis. Economics has to be replaced by a global science whose characteristics and field of inquiry are still unknown: a science that would be able to study the processes of formation of Cyberspace, understood as the global network of signs-commodities. In an interview published in 1993 by the Californian magazine Wired, Peter Drucker develops once again the theme of the inadequacy of economic categories associated with the digitalization of productive processes: International economic theory is obsolete. The traditional factors of production – land, labor, and capital – are becoming restraints rather than driving forces. Knowledge is becoming the one critical factor of production. It has two incarnations: knowledge applied to existing processes, services, and products is productivity; knowledge applied to the new is innovation. […] Knowledge has become the central, key resource that knows no geography. It underlies the most significant and unprecedented social phenomenon of this century.

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No class in history has ever risen as fast as the blue-collar worker and no class has fallen as fast. All within less than a century.30

Furthermore, Drucker remarks that the concept of intellectual property, which is the juridical concept that was at the basis of classical economy and of the capitalist system, no longer has any meaning in an age when the circulating commodity is information and the market is the info-sphere: We have to rethink the whole concept of intellectual property, which was focused on the printed word. Perhaps within a few decades, the distinction between electronic transmissions and the printed word will have disappeared. The only solution may be a universal licensing system. Where you basically become a subscriber, and where it is taken for granted that everything that is published is reproduced. In other words, if you don’t want everybody to know, don’t talk about it.31

The system of property regarding the products of intellectual labor no longer works in the age of the reproducibility of information. As a conclusion to these observations on the obsolescence of economics as a generalized interpretive code, I would like to quote André Gorz, who writes in his Métamorphoses du travail: Discipline by means of money is a hetero-regulation that interrupts the communicational infrastructure ensuring the symbolic reproduction of the experiential world. This means that all the activities that transmit or reproduce cultural acquisitions, knowledge, taste, manners, language, mores […], and that allow us to find our bearings in the world as givens, certitudes, values, and self-explanatory norms; all these activities cannot be regulated by money or by the state without causing serious pathologies in our world of experience.32

Money (i.e. economics) and the State (i.e. politics) are no longer able to govern or to discipline the world of production, now that its center is no longer a de-brained force, a uniform and quantifiable time of manual work. That center is now occupied by mind flows, by the ethereal substance of intelligence, which eludes every measurement and cannot be subjected to any rule without inducing enormous pathologies and causing a truly maddening paralysis of cognition and affectivity. Translated by Giuseppina Mecchia

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Notes 1. Potere Operaio [Workers’ Power] was a leftist group active in Northern and Central Italy from 1969 until its dissolution in 1973. Among its founders was Antonio “Toni” Negri, who was at the time professor of political philosophy at the University of Padova. The group was mainly composed of students, workers and intellectuals, who often came from different backgrounds. As long as it lasted, Potere Operaio was a site of lively, innovative political debate, where new interpretations both of the Marxist heritage and of larger anti-authoritarian struggles were furthered. 2. Franco Berardi is quoting from the Italian translation of “Produktion und Klassenkampf,” a chapter of Konstitution und Klassenkampf (Frankfurt: Neue Kritik, 1971). This book hasn’t been translated into English and the Italian translation is therefore my only reference. The German original of parts of this chapter is now available on the web at the following site: [www.krahlstudien.de/texte/produnklass.html]. I haven’t been able, though, to locate the passages quoted by Bifo. (Translator’s note.) 3. Claussen, Loewy, Negt, Riedemann, Introduction to: Hans Jürgen Krahl, Costituzione e Lotta di Classe (Milan: Jaca Books, 1978) 15. 4. Hans Jürgen Krahl, Costituzione e lotta di classe (357). 5. Hans Jürgen Krahl, Costituzione e lotta di classe (357). 6. Hans Jürgen Krahl, “Thesen zum allgemeinem Verhältnis von wissenschaftlicher Intelligenz und proletarischem Klassenbewusstsein.” In: Konstitution und Klassenkampf (Frankfurt: Neue Kritik, 1971) 330-347. While I have used Bifo’s own Italian translation as a basis for my own, I have checked and slightly modified all quotes coming from it against the German original as it currently appears on the following website: [www.krahlstudien.de/texte/intellprol.html]. (Translator’s note.) 7. Hans Jürgen Krahl, “Thesen…” (367). 8. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man. Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Societies (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964) 86-87. (Translator’s note: Marcuse is quoting Stanley Gerr, “Language and Science,” Philosophy of Science, April 1942, 156.) 9. Marcuse 1964 (123). 10. Marcuse 1964 (133). 11. Marcuse 1964 (159). 12. Marcuse 1964 (159). 13. Paolo Virno, “Virtuosity and Revolution,” translated by Ed Emery and made available on the Web on May 1 2004 on the following site: [www.makeworlds.org/node/ view/34]. Bifo quotes from the Italian text, originally published in the journal Luogo Comune and then made available in Mondanità (Rome: manifestolibri, 1994). I have slightly altered Emery’s translation. (Translator’s note.) 14. Virno 2004 (2). 15. Virno 2004 (2). 16. Virno 2004 (4-5). 17. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Grant, intro by Mike Gane (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1993) 51. 18. Virno 2004 (7). 19. I translate as “Net” the Italian “rete,” which indicates both an earlier and a more comprehensive reality with respect to Internet or the Web. (Translator’s note.) 20. Arthur Kroker and Robert Weinstein, Data Trash (New York: St. Martin Press, 1994) 7. 21. Kroker and Weinstein 1994 (7-8). 22. Kroker and Weinstein 1994 (23-24). 23. Kroker and Weinstein 1994 (65).

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24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Kroker and Weinstein 1994 (89). Peter Drucker, The New Realities (New York: Harper and Row, 1989) 156-157. Drucker 1989 (166). Jacques Robin, Changer d’ère (Paris: Seuil, 1989) 39. Baudrillard (2). Baurdrillard (59). Peter Drucker in “Post-Capitalist,” an interview by Peter Schwarz published in Wired, July-August 1993. Now accessible on the following website: [www. wired.com/wired/archive/1.03/drucker_pr.html]. 31. Ibid. 32. André Gorz, Métamorphoses du travail. Quête du sens, critique de la raison économique. (Paris : Galilée, 1988) 132.

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Introduction to Franco Berardi (Bifo)’s

“Schizo-Economy” The following is a translation from Bifo’s recent book Il Sapiente, Il Mercante, Il Guerriero [The Sage, the Merchant, and the Warrior] (Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2004). This book is, as Bifo says, really two books in one. It is both a genealogy of power and resistance since the 1960s (and in this sense, a rewriting of Bifo’s earlier La Nefasta Utopia di Potere Operaio) and an analysis of contemporary capitalism. The passage excerpted below examines the transformations of capitalism during the 1990s, and in particular the division of the world into a virtual sphere of hyperdevelopment and a physical sphere of permanent warfare. The 1990s saw the emergence of a utopianism comparable to that of the 1960s. This utopianism, associated with the proliferation of electronic technology and cyber culture, was far removed from the autonomist program of the reduction of work. It was in fact accompanied by a neoliberal economy of hyper-work. What is striking about Bifo’s analysis is its insistence on the interrelatedness of the monetary economy and the global economy of the mind and affects. What the euphoria expressed so adamantly in the journal Wired’s celebration of cyberculture never took into account was the incapacity of human beings to adapt to a suddenly changed environment. The new proliferation of information has a catastrophic effect on human affect. Updating Virilio, Bifo analyses the gap between the infinite speed of the infosphere (the mediascape, or cyberspace) and the slowness of the human organism. Human beings respond to their new state of hyper-stimulation by a panic reaction only partially alleviated through pharmacology. Bifo links the economic crises of the late 1990s to the new demand for pharmaceutical drugs—cocaine, amphetamines, Prozac —and the multiplication of psychic disorders such as depression, attention deficit disorder, and dyslexia. Disturbing as it is, this symptomatology of the present does not result in despair. Rather, Bifo outlines strategies against what he describes as the totalitarian mechanisms of contemporary power, mechanisms that directly activate and stimulate the human nervous system, bypassing the level of discursive political choices. Bifo discusses forms of resistance—such as media activism—that subvert the specific techno-social interfaces through which these mechanisms function. To use the language of the website created by Bifo and Matteo Pasqunelli, Bifo examines the possibilities for creative “rekombination” and the invention of other possible futures. Michael Goddard, translator SubStance #112, Vol. 36, no. 1, 2007

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Schizo-Economy Franco Berardi (Bifo)

A New Disciplinary Field At the end of the period of capitalist triumphalism and neoliberal ideological hegemony, must we return to the old analytical categories of Marxism and the political strategies of the twentieth-century workers’ movement, to the horizons of democratic socialism or revolutionary communism? Nothing would be more inconclusive. The capitalism of mass networks that was fully implemented in the 1990s has produced social forms that are completely irreducible to the Marxist analysis of class. The categories of the critique of political economy are now insufficient, because processes of subjectivation traverse fields that are much more complex. A new disciplinary field is starting to be delineated in the encounter between the territories of economics, semiology, and psychochemistry. Semio-capital is capital-flux that coagulates in semiotic artefacts without materializing itself. The concepts forged by two centuries of economic thought seem to have disintegrated; they seem inoperative and incapable of comprehending a great deal of the phenomena that have emerged in the sphere of social production since the time when production became cognitive. Cognitive activity has always been at the basis of human production, including production of a more mechanical variety. There is no human labor process that does not imply the exercise of intelligence. But now cognitive capacity is becoming the essential productive resource. In the sphere of industrial labor, the mind was put to work as a repetitive automatism, as the physiological support of muscular movement. Today the mind is at work as innovation, as language and as a communicative relation. The subsumption of the mind under the process of capitalist valorization leads to a genuine mutation. The conscious and sensitive organism is submitted to competitive pressure, to an acceleration of stimuli, to constant attentive stress. As a result, the mental environment, the infosphere in which the mind develops and enters into relations with other minds, becomes a psychopathogenic environment. To understand semio-capital’s infinite

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game of mirrors, we must outline a new disciplinary field delimited by three aspects: –the critique of the political economy of connective intelligence; –the semiology of linguistic-economic fluxes; –a psychochemistry of the infospheric environment that studies the psychopathogenic effects of economic exploitation on the human mind. The process of digital production is tending to assume a biological form. It is becoming like an organism: the nervous system of an organization is analogous to the human nervous system. Every industrial enterprise has “autonomic” systems, operational processes that must function for its survival. What was lacking from organizations in the past were the links between pieces of information, corresponding to neurons interconnected in the brain. The networked digital business functions like an excellent artificial nervous system. In it, information flows quickly and naturally, like thought in a human being, and we are able to use technology to govern and co-ordinate groups of people with the same speed with which we can concentrate on a specific problem. According to Bill Gates (Business @ the Speed of Thought), the conditions have now been created for the realization of a new kind of economic system, centered on what can be defined as “Business at the speed of thought.” In the connected world, the retroactive loops1 of general systems theory are fused with the dynamic logic of biogenetics in a post-human vision of digital production. Human minds and human flesh will be able to integrate themselves with the digital circuit thanks to interfaces of acceleration and simplification: a model of bio-info production is emerging that produces semiotic artefacts capable of automatically replicating living systems in accordance with the laws of the capitalist economy. Once fully operative, the digital nervous system can rapidly install itself in every form of organization. This means that it is only in appearance that Microsoft concerns itself with software, products and services. In reality, the hidden aim of software production is that of wiring the human mind into a network continuum2 of the cybernetic type, destined to structure the fluxes of digital information via the nervous system of all the key institutions of contemporary life. Microsoft needs therefore to be considered as a global virtual memory that can be downloaded and installed at any time. A cyber-panoptikon inserted in the fleshy circuits of human subjectivity. Cybernetics finally becomes life, or, as Bill Gates likes to say, “information is our vital fluid.”

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The Psychic Collapse of the Economy The digital nervous system progressively incorporates itself into the organic nervous system, the circuit of human communication, recodifying it in accordance with its operational parameters and specific velocity. But in order for this transformation to take place, the bodymind [corpo-mente] must undergo an infernal mutation, one we are now seeing unfold in world history. To understand and analyze this process, neither the conceptual instruments of political economy nor those of technological analysis are sufficient. The production process is becoming semiotic; the formation of the digital nervous system involves and enervates the mind, the social psyche, desires and hopes, fears and the imagination. It follows that if we want to analyze these productive transformations, we must concern ourselves with semiotic production, with linguistic and cognitive mutation. And this mutation occurs by means of the spread of pathologies. Neoliberal culture has injected into the social brain a constant stimulus towards competition, and the technical system of the digital network has rendered possible an intensification of the informatic stimuli transmitted from the social brain to individual brains. This acceleration of stimuli is a pathogenic factor that has wide-ranging social effects. The combination of economic competition with the digital intensification of informatic stimuli induces a state of permanent electrocution that leads to a diffuse pathological condition; this pathological condition manifests itself as panic syndrome or attention disorder. Panic is an ever-more widespread syndrome. Until a few years ago, psychiatrists hardly recognized this symptom, which belonged rather to the Romantic literary imagination and was associated with the feeling of being overwhelmed by the infinite richness of natural forms, by the unlimited power of the cosmos. Today panic is ever-more frequently denounced as a painful and worrying symptom—the physical sensation of no longer succeeding in governing one’s own body, an acceleration of the heart rate, a shortness of breath that can lead to fainting and paralysis. Although, to my knowledge, there exists no exhaustive research on this issue, the hypothesis can be proposed that the mediatization of communication and the consequent rarefaction of physical contact can provoke pathologies in the affective and emotional spheres. For the first time in human history, there exists a generation that has learned more words and heard more stories from television than from its mother. Attention disorders are increasingly widespread. Millions of North American and European children are treated for a disturbance that

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manifests itself as the incapacity to concentrate on an object for more than a few seconds. The constant excitation of the mind by neurostimulant fluxes probably leads to a pathological state of saturation. If we want to understand the contemporary economy we must concern ourselves with the psychopathology of relations. And if we want to understand contemporary psychochemistry we must take into account the fact that the mind is invested by semiotic fluxes that follow an extrasemiotic principle: the principle of economic competition, the principle of maximum exploitation. Ever since capitalism has connected to the brain, it has inserted into it a pathogenic agent, a psychotic meme that accelerates pulsations until they become tremors, to the point of collapse. During the 1990s, the culture of Prozac was inseparable from the culture of the new economy. Hundreds of thousands of operators, directors and managers of the Western economy have taken innumerable decisions in a state of chemical euphoria and psychopharmacological lightheadedness. But eventually the body [l’organismo] caved in, unable to support indefinitely the chemical euphoria that had sustained competitive enthusiasm and productivist fanaticism. Collective attention is now supersaturated and this is provoking social and economic collapse. Just as with a cyclotimic3 organism or a patient affected by bipolar disorder,4 the financial euphoria of the 1990s was followed by depression. This depression is also of the clinical variety; it undermines motivation, initiative, self-esteem, desire and sex-appeal. To understand the crisis of the new economy, we must begin from the psychic experience of the virtual class; we must reflect on the psychic and emotional state of the millions of cognitive workers who animated the scenes of business, culture and the imaginary during the 1990s. The psychic depression of a single cognitive worker is not a consequence of the economic crisis, but its cause. It would be simple to consider depression as the consequence of a bad business cycle. After having worked happily and profitably for so many years, share value plummets and our brain worker5 suffers a bad case of depression. That’s not what happened. The cognitive worker has fallen into depression because his or her emotional, physical and intellectual system cannot indefinitely support the hyperactivity provoked by the market and by psycho-pharmaceuticals. It’s as a result of this that things have started to go wrong on the market. What is the market? It’s the place where signs and the need for meaning, where desires and projections meet. If we want to speak of supply and demand, then we must think in terms of fluxes of desire and in terms of semiotic attractors that have lost their appeal.6

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In the Net economy, flexibility has evolved into a form of labor fractalization. Fractalization means the modular and recombinant fragmentation of activity time. The worker no longer exists as a person. He or she is only an interchangeable producer of those micro-fragments of recombinant semiosis that enter into the continuous flux of the Net. Capital no longer remunerates the worker’s prolonged availability for exploitation; it no longer pays a salary that covers a working person’s full range of economic needs. The worker (a machine endowed with a brain that can be used for fragments of time) is paid for momentary, occasional and temporary services. Work time is fragmented and cellularized. Cells of time are for sale on the Net and businesses can buy as many as they want without being obliged to contribute in any way to the worker’s social security. Cognitive labor is an ocean of microscopic fragments of time; cellularization is the technique that makes it possible to recombine fragments of time within the framework of a single semioproduct. The cell phone can be considered the assembly line of cognitive labor, thanks to which the total dependence of cognitive labor is realized. The intense and prolonged investment of mental and libidinal energies in the labor process has created the conditions for a psychic collapse that has passed into the economic arena with the recession and the fall in demand; it has passed into the political arena in the form of military aggression. The use of the word “collapse” is not metaphorical; it describes what is happening to the Western mind with clinical accuracy. The word “collapse” refers to a genuine pathological case, one that invests the psycho-social organism. What we saw in the period after the first symptoms of economic decline, during the first months of the new century, was a psychopathic phenomenon of overexcitement, heart tremors, panic and, finally, decline into depression. Economic depression has always involved a crisis of the psycho-social equilibrium, but now that the production process has integrated the brain in a substantial way, psychopathology has become the most important aspect of economic cycles. The attention time available to the workers involved in the informatic cycle is constantly being reduced: they are involved in a growing number of mental tasks that occupy every fragment of their attention time. They no longer have time to dedicate to love, tenderness or affection. They take Viagra because they don’t have time for sexual preliminaries. They take cocaine to be constantly alert and reactive. They take Prozac to cancel out the sense of meaninglessness that unexpectedly empties their life of any interest. Cellularization has led to a kind of permanent occupation

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of life time. The result is a psychopathic mutation of social relations. The signs are clear: millions of packets of psycho-pharmaceuticals sold; an epidemic of attention disorders spreading among children and adolescents; the quotidian use of Ritalin and other drugs at school; a panic epidemic that seems to be spreading through the fabric of everyday life. The Infosphere and the Social Mind The mediascape7 is the continuously evolving media system, the universe of transmitters that send signals to our brain in the most varied formats. The infosphere is the interface between the media system and the mind that receives these signals – the mental ecosphere, that immaterial region where semiotic fluxes interact with the reception antennae of the minds scattered across the planet. The Mind is the universe of receivers. These receivers are of course not limited to receiving signals; they also process and create them, thereby setting in motion new processes of transmission and provoking the continuous evolution of the mediascape. The evolution of the infosphere in the video-electronic era—the activation of increasingly complex networks for the distribution of information—has produced a leap not just in the power and speed, but in the very format of the infosphere. No corresponding leap has occurred with regard to the power and format of Reception. The universe of receivers—the ensemble of human brains, of real people made of flesh and fragile and sensual organs—is not formatted according to the same standards as the system of digital transmitters. The functional paradigm of the universe of Transmitters does not correspond to that of the universe of Receivers. This asymmetry manifests itself in various pathological effects: permanent electrocution, panic, overexcitement, hypermobility, attention disorders, dyslexia, information overload, the saturation of reception circuits. This saturation results from a genuine deformity. The format of the universe of transmitters has evolved, multiplying its powers, while the format of the universe of receivers has not been able to evolve in as rapid a manner—for the simple reason that it is based on an organic support structure (the human brain-body) that has an evolutionary pace completely different from that of machines. What is presently unfolding could be defined as a paradigmatic discrepancy, a rift between the paradigms that determine the universe of transmitters and that of receivers. In such a situation, communication

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becomes an asymmetrical, disturbed process. We could speak of a discrepancy between an endlessly expanding cyberspace and cybertime. Cyberspace is a network that includes mechanical and organic components, and its processing power can be accelerated endlessly; cybertime is an essentially lived reality, linked to an organic support (the human body and brain), and its processing pace cannot be accelerated beyond relatively rigid natural limits. Ever since he wrote Speed and Politics in 1977, Paul Virilio has maintained that speed is the decisive factor in modern history. It is thanks to speed, Virilio claims, that wars are won—not only military ones, but also commercial ones. In numerous publications, Virilio demonstrates that the speed of movement, of transportation and motorization has allowed armies to win wars throughout the last century. Ever since it has become possible to substitute objects, goods and people with signs— that is, with virtual and electronically transferable phantasms— the limits of speed have been expanded by the most impressive process of acceleration that human history has ever seen. There is a sense in which one can say that space no longer exists, since information can travel across it instantly and events can be transferred in real time from one place on the planet to another, becoming virtually shared events. But what are the consequences of this acceleration for the human mind and the human body? To understand them, we must consider the thinking and feeling organism’s capacity for the conscious elaboration and affective assimilation of signs and events. The acceleration of information exchanges has produced—and continues to produce—a pathological effect not just on the individual human mind, but also on the collective mind. Individuals are not able to consciously process the immense and ever-increasing quantity of information that enters their computers, their cell phones, their television screens, their electronic diaries and their heads. And yet it seems essential to follow, know, evaluate, assimilate, and process all this information, if one wants to be efficient, competitive, victorious. The practice of multitasking,8 the opening of hypertextual windows of attention and the constant passage from one context to another all tend to deform the sequential modalities of mental processing. According to Christian Marazzi, who has concerned himself in various publications with the relations between the linguistic economy and affectivity, the latest generation of economic agents is affected by a genuine form of dyslexia: they are unable to read a page from beginning to end according to sequential procedures, unable to focus attention on one object for a

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prolonged period of time. Dyslexia becomes an increasingly widespread characteristic of cognitive and social behavior, to the point where the pursuit of linear strategies becomes almost impossible. Some (like Davenport and Beck, in the book Attention Economy), speak of an “attention economy.” But when a cognitive faculty becomes part of economic discourse, this means that it has become a scarce resource. There is a shortage of the time necessary for paying attention to the fluxes of information we are exposed to and must evaluate in our decisionmaking processes. The consequence is in front of our eyes: political and economic decisions no longer respond to any long-term strategic rationality; they simply obey immediate interests. What is more, we are less and less inclined to freely contribute our attention. We no longer have the attention time for love, tenderness, nature, pleasure and compassion. Our attention is ever more besieged, and therefore we devote it only to our career, to competition and economic decisions. In any case, it’s clear that we cannot replicate the insane speed of the hypercomplex digital machine. Human beings are tending to become the ruthless executors of decisions taken inattentively. The universe of transmitters—or cyberspace—now operates at superhuman speed; it cannot be adequately coordinated with a universe of receivers—or cybertime—that is incapable of going any faster than the physical substance of the brain, the slowness of the body and the need for caresses and affection. A pathological rift opens up and mental illness spreads, as testified to by the statistics and above all by our everyday experience. And as pathology spreads, so too do drugs. The flourishing industry of psycho-pharmaceuticals sets new records every year; the sales of Ritalin, Prozac, Zoloft and other psychotropics increase continually, while alienation, suffering, desperation and terror, the desire not to exist, to not have to fight constantly, to disappear all increase, along with the will to kill and to kill oneself. When an acceleration of productive and communicative rhythms was imposed in the Western metropoles towards the end of the 1970s, we witnessed a drug epidemic of giant proportions. The world was leaving its human epoch to enter the era of machinic and post-human acceleration; many sensitive organisms of the human variety began to snort cocaine, a substance that allows one to accelerate one’s existential rhythm to the point of becoming a machine. Many other sensitive organisms of the human kind injected heroin into their veins, a substance that de-links a person from the pace of their environment. The epidemic of powders that erupted between the 1970s and 1980s produced an

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existential and cultural devastation of which we have yet to take stock. Then illegal drugs were replaced by those legal substances that the whitecoated pharmaceutical industry provides to its victims; the epoch of anti-depressants, of uppers and mood regulators began. Today psychopathology reveals itself more and more clearly as a social and, more precisely, a socio-communicative epidemic. If you want to survive you have to be competitive; if you want to be competitive you have to be connected—you have to continually receive and process an immense and growing mass of data. This provokes constant attention stress and a reduction in the time available for affectivity. These two closely linked tendencies spell devastation for the individual psyche. Depression, panic, anxiety, a sense of solitude, existential misery. But these individual symptoms cannot be isolated indefinitely, as psychopathology has done until now, and as economic power wants them to be. It’s not possible to say: “You’re exhausted, go take a vacation at Club Med, take a pill, go on a cure, get off my balls, recover in the psychiatric hospital, kill yourself.” It’s no longer possible, for the simple reason that the issue is no longer a small minority of crazies or a marginal number of depressives. It’s a question of a growing mass of existential misery threatening to explode in the center of the social system. It’s also necessary to consider this decisive fact: as long as capital needed to suck physical energy from its exploited and from its slaves, psychopathology could remain relatively marginal. Your psychic suffering didn’t matter much to capital when you only had to turn screws and handle a lathe. You could be as sad as a solitary fly in a bottle; your productivity was hardly affected because your muscles still functioned. Today capital needs mental energies, psychic energies. And they’re exactly what’s going to hell. That’s why psychopathology is exploding at the center of the social scene. The economic crisis results largely from the spread of sadness, depression, panic, lack of motivation. The crisis of the new economy was provoked in considerable part by a crisis of motivation, by a waning of the artificial euphoria of the 1990s. This has led to disinvestment and, in part, to a fall in consumption. In general, unhappiness functions as a stimulus to consumption; to purchase something is to suspend one’s anxiety, to counteract one’s loneliness, but only up to a point. Beyond that point, suffering has a negative effect on the desire to purchase. So conflicting strategies are developed. The masters of the world certainly don’t want humanity to be happy, because a happy humanity would not let itself get caught up in productivity, the discipline of work or hypermarkets. Nonetheless, techniques that can reduce happiness to a

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tolerable level are being studied, in order to postpone or prevent a suicidal explosion, in order to induce the desire to consume. What strategies will the collective organism follow in order to escape this factory of unhappiness? Is a strategy of deceleration, of the reduction of complexity possible and conceivable? I don’t believe so. In human society, potentiality cannot be definitively canceled out, even when it reveals itself to be lethal for the individual and, in all probability, for the species as well. Such potentiality is regulated and kept under control for as long as possible, but in the end it is inevitably actualized, as happened (and will happen again) with the atomic bomb. One possible strategy consists in the upgrading9 of the human organism, the mechanical adjustment of the human body and brain to a hyper-fast infosphere. This is the strategy commonly defined as “post-human.”10 Finally, a strategy of subtraction is possible, a strategy of distancing oneself from the vortex—but only small communities will be able to follow it, constituting spheres of existential, economic, and informational autonomy from the world economy. Translated by Michael Goddard Translator’s Notes 1. English in original. 2. English in original. 3. “Cyclotimic,” is a medical term for manic depression or violent mood swings. 4. English in original. 5. English in original. 6. English in original. 7. English in original. 8. English in original. 9. English in original. 10. English in original.

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Introduction to Maurizio Lazzarato’s

“Strategies of the Political Entrepreneur” As a student in Padua during the 1970s, Maurizio Lazzarato participated in Autonomia Operaia, and like many other participants, he was driven into political exile in Paris by the Italian state’s ruthless repression of that group and others on the extra-parliamentary left. The charges against him were resolved in the 1990s, but he continues to reside in Paris, where he has become a noted independent sociologist and philosopher engaged in research into immaterial labor, the transformation of waged labor, cognitive capitalism and “post-socialist” social movements. He has published several books, including Videofilosofia, percezione e lavoro nel post-fordismo (Rome: Manifestolibri, 1997) [Videophilosophy: Perception and Labor in Post-Fordism] and Puissances de l’invention: La psychologie économique de Gabriel Tarde contre l’économie politique (Paris: Editions les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2002) [Powers of Invention: Gabrial Tarde’s Economic Psychology Against Political Economy], and served on the editorial boards of the journals Futur antérieur and Multitudes. He has been both an active participant in and an acute analyst of several major social and political movements in Europe over the past decade, including the Tute Bianche and the intermittent entertainment workers. As this essay demonstrates, Lazzarato is also an adept analyst of publicity, cinema and the mass media, and the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism that they reflect. It was originally published in French, in the journal Futur antérieur, in 1994, and later revised for Italian publication in Lazzarato’s book Lavoro immateriale: Forme di vita e produzione di soggettività (Verona: Ombre Corte, 1997) [Immaterial Labor: Forms of Life and the Production of Subjectivity]. The translation is based on the revised Italian version. Timothy S. Murphy, translator

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Strategies of the Political Entrepreneur Maurizio Lazzarato When Silvio Berlusconi won the elections in 1994, the international press unleashed an avalanche of not particularly well-meaning commentary, while the left and the democrats expressed their own quite understandable indignation. But all this chatter threatened only to titillate the new forms of power, even in the best of cases. The truth that then had to be asserted and now has to be repeated, beyond the various electoral results, is that a critique of Berlusconi’s politics is impossible without a critique of the new forms of capitalist accumulation. More generally, a critique of “communication” (of which many continue to speak, àpropos of Berlusconi) is impossible without going against the grain of all the theories that, in the 1980s, were constructed precisely on the more or less explicit presupposition of the overcoming of capitalism and its laws by the various paradigms of communication. But this is exactly the opposite of what happened. The social machine, the productive machine, the communicative machine, and the political machine are tending to become articulations of a single process: the capitalist domination of the real, of the whole of the real. The different machines all function on the same plane of immanence, on the “body without organs” of money-Capital, of which they are only “modes and attributes.” The relative autonomy of the communicative machine, as we once used to say to account for its relationship with capitalism (a relative autonomy that permitted forms of despotic, and thus not specifically capitalist, subordination like “propaganda”), has given way to the complete “deterritorialization” (decoding) of the flows of communication, their semantic contents and their traditional speakers, by the logic of the market. Berlusconi’s enterprise is a mechanism [dispositivo]1 that actually allows us to observe how the enterprise has become the “soul” of those forms of communication that once followed indirectly from it: journalism, (“independent” or state-run) news, cinema, sports, game shows, etc.2 Italy, they say, is a political laboratory, but it must immediately be added that it is a laboratory in which the forms of governability of this new capitalist configuration are being tested. In fact, in the figure of Berlusconi one can no longer distinguish the entrepreneur (who assures the production of surplus-value), the media 87 SubStance #112, Vol. 36, no. 1, 2007

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boss (who produces public opinion), and the politician (who organizes public space). Instead of being hierarchically arranged, these functions reciprocally presuppose one another. Benetton and Flows If Berlusconi continues to obtain a strong political and electoral consensus, this should not be attributed to his ownership of television networks, but to the fact that he represents in an emblematic and even material fashion the new figure of the entrepreneur that we have called the “political entrepreneur.”3 In other words, his electoral success is not due to a manipulation of the media, but to a real and profound complicity in a new mode of production, within which he swims like a fish in water. The fact that this new entrepreneur uses communication as a strategic mode of command and organization can only lead us to understand that we have entered into a new paradigm, in which the relationship between the economic, the social and the political is turned upside down. In order to comprehend this passage and to eliminate any misunderstanding, therefore, it is useful to refer to another Italian entrepreneurial experiment—one that, far from controlling the media, establishes itself over the control of flows: flows of labor, flows of consumption, flows of communication, flows of desires. We are referring to that entrepreneurial “anomaly” that bears the name Benetton. Benetton, in fact, is a very strange entrepreneur in many ways that are inexplicable within the traditional framework of economic theory: it has no workers, and it lacks factories and distribution networks.4 In order to avoid confusing the mental habits of leftists too much, one could say that Benetton has established a new relation to production, distribution and consumption. For it, the extraction of surplus-value is no longer the result of the direct exploitation of labor; on the contrary, exploitation is organized by the small and medium-sized units of production, or self-exploitation is self-organized by “enterpriseindividuals,” called “autonomous labor” in Italy.5 Surplus-value derives from the production and control of flows, primarily financial and communicational flows. Within this framework, a flow can be captured only by a more powerful flow. Only at the conjunction of different flows (of production, circulation, consumption and desire) is there production of surplus-value, and only there does this production become visible. The function of the entrepreneur is thus to encourage the flows and capture them. In this framework, the machine of communication, with its a-signifying and signifying flows, is an enormous mechanism for the capture of

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surplus-value and not for the production of ideology. The new capitalism constitutes itself on the power of flows, on the differential of their speed of circulation, so the entrepreneur is defined by his capacity to function as a relay and multiplier of their speed of circulation.6 To put it another way, the production of surplus-value, the production of meaning, and the production of public space are the articulations of the work of the political entrepreneur (personified here in Benetton), which have functioned since the end of the 1970s in parallel with the forms of Fordist production, its political system and its public opinion. Over the past twenty years, this mutation in the capitalist form of accumulation has eroded both the material constitution and the formal constitution that emerged out of the Second World War. To explain the collapse of Fordism and its political system in Italy by means of scandals and corruption (which were obviously quite real!) is to mistake effects for causes.7

The Flows of Labor Since we do not yet have available a working description of the machine of communication as an “apparatus of capture,” I will limit myself here to offering several elementary reflections on the functioning of the multinational Benetton. As regards “production,” Benetton’s principal preoccupation is not to manage it but to federate it,8 to structure the productive networks that already exist independently of it. Its relationship with the networks is political in the sense that its basic function is no longer that of organizing the “time and method” of factory labor, or establishing differentials of productivity by means of productive innovation (as did the classical entrepreneur of Schumpeter), but to ensure the “social construction of the market” within an autonomous productive fabric. The characteristics that today best identify the specific character of the enterprise’s function seem to be social participation, the fluidity of networks, and the permanence of circuits. The localization of production is only of limited importance. Instead, insertion into the tertiary circuits of finance and services is decisive; insertion into the networks of communication and high technology is ultimately necessary. But here we must pay close attention: the systematic relativization of all components takes place in a temporal dimension that traverses and occupies social space and realizes a concrete valorization. If the factory can no longer be seen, this is not because it has disappeared but because it has been socialized, and in this

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sense it has become immaterial: an immateriality that nevertheless continues to produce social relations, values, and profits.9 In order to understand the figure of the entrepreneur, it is necessary to use the categories of mediation and legitimation among the different actors (bank, productive unit, local collective, consumers, distributors, etc.), in place of the categories of business discipline or administrative constraint. Networks of Commercialization The distribution networks do not belong to Benetton either. The small units of distribution that it directly controls have only an experimental function. The distribution network is organized according to the method of franchising.10 In this part of the cycle we discover the very same characteristics of control and organization that we saw functioning in the industrial flows: social and political management of the networks via the “market” instead of direct disciplinary or administrative bonds. The head office offers a retailer its brand and its merchandise, which is to say an “aura,” an identity, a means of producing revenue. The retailer will no longer be an anonymous retailer but a Benetton shop. In return, it will sell only Benetton merchandise, it will follow the precise rules of style and behavior, and it will do everything it can to honor the “brand.” It is this name, with its enormous communicative potential, the result of billions in investment capital, that represents the source of revenue and the real principle of identity. Thus any retailer whatsoever, in its autonomy and without contradicting the sacred law of individual initiative, may become a dependent of the “big boss” and a subject of the empire. Flow of Desire, Consumption, and the Production of Subjectivity In relation to production and distribution, we have seen how Benetton works to set in motion “social conditions” for the development of productive and distributive networks by using political forms of mediation, legitimization and communication. We will now see it working toward the construction of a true public space and its values. One of the most important functions exercised by the political entrepreneur in the “social construction of the market” is that of constituting the “consumer,” a function that in this case is exercised by means of a very precise instrument: publicity. It is well known that Benetton, unlike the Fordist enterprise, does not delegate its publicity to outside “agencies,” since it considers publicity to be a “productive factor” of the same sort as others. But in the post-Fordist enterprise, the

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productivity of publicity finds its economic rationale not so much in sales as in the “production of subjectivity.”11 It is the mediating form through which the “interaction” with consumers is organized, and it comes increasingly to resemble political action, since this is where the production of meaning for the market takes place—but this is a market that has the same contours as society itself. The development of Benetton’s publicity can be described via the specification of three stages, which in themselves summarize the history and the future of publicity. This development can be defined as the passage from advertising to publicity and from publicity to “social communication,” in which the root word “public” in “publicity” assumes its full signification. Advertising belongs to the era in which publicity served above all to help sell the product. The commodity object as such was what triumphed— in the poster, the spot or the newspaper. We then passed on to the form of publicity that had to construct, in time, the brand image of a product or enterprise. Now, with the new publicity produced by Benetton (the AIDS patient, the newborn infant, the ship filled with Albanian refugees, etc.), the commodity disappears from the publicity and the brand, which remains, is confined to a corner of the publicity material.12 The image, on the other hand, is a directly cultural, political or ethical image. What happens in this passage? As one of the major French critics of the image insists, in an analysis of Benetton publicity, “What is happening is that publicity no longer works on behalf of the market, but rather the triumphant market works on behalf of publicity. More precisely, the market acts as a pedestal for publicity because publicity gives form to [informi] a vast landscape to know and conquer.”13 More precisely still, publicity does not serve merely to provide information about markets, but to constitute them. It enters into an “interactive” relationship with the consumer, addressing itself not only to her needs but above all to her desires. It addresses itself not only to her passions and emotions, but also directly interpellates “political” rationality. It produces not just the consumer but the “individual” of immaterial capitalism. It engages in dialogue with her convictions, values, and opinions, and has the courage to interpellate her where the political fears to go. Publicity is one of the most important forms of social and political communication at this turn of the century. Publicity as such increasingly occupies “public space,” animates it, provokes it, arouses it. The enterprise produces “meaning” directly. The distinction between citizen and consumer belongs to another era, and Benetton publicity scandalizes because it tells us that we have entered the era of immaterial, “psychic,” or “spiritual” goods that abolishes the boundary between

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the economic and the political. The analyses of publicity provided by Roland Barthes or Umberto Eco, based on rhetoric, are henceforth definitively obsolete. Two further observations. Regarding the first, we must emphasize that what is demanded of citizen-consumers is genuine “labor” since the actions of the consumer (her desires and values) are directly integrated, as a creative moment, into the social network of the enterprise.14 The flows of desire are directly convened, tested, verified, and stimulated by the post-Fordist enterprise’s communication. Marketing reveals its true nature here: it constructs the product and solicits forms of subjectification. The consumer is no longer the passive mass-consumer of standardized commodities, but the active individual involved with the totality of her persona: to this end, it is necessary to “know” and solicit her ideology, lifestyle and conception of the world.15 One cannot criticize marketing from a humanist viewpoint (“politics is not the selling of a product,” the beautiful souls complain) since it is the very essence of contemporary capitalism. Capitalism is no longer the capitalism of production, but of the product. Marketing is no longer merely a technique for selling, but a mechanism that is constitutive of social relations, information and values for the market—one that integrates the techniques and “responsibility” of the political. The second observation concerns what Godard told us a long time ago regarding television and publicity, that the distinction between information and publicity is no longer relevant. What does this mean, Serge Daney asks? “It means that the image has completely swung over to the side of economic power.” Postmodern authors have deduced from this the power of the image over the real and the capacity of signs to circulate to infinity, destroying all meaning. De-realization and “the end of history,” they tell us. In reality it involves a war machine which, like the immaterial enterprise (but can we still distinguish these things?), produces meaning. The Gulf War was the general test of the management and regulation (from one viewpoint, in one sense, and according to one strategy) of the flows of information, images, and sounds and their speed of circulation.16 If we now make up a balance sheet of the different functions that the new entrepreneur exercises, we will understand even more readily the roots of the phenomenon of delegitimization that the political is undergoing. In practice, all the political functions (the construction of the social conditions for production and the market as well as the forms of mediation between production and the social, the production of

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subjectivity and the organization of public space) are assumed by business. There is no longer any autonomy possible for the social, the political or communication. They are completely subordinated to the logic of the enterprise.17 The Benetton production cycle is coextensive with the production of society, and exploits it.18 Social, productive and communicative relations are traversed and set to work by the political entrepreneur. The production of surplus-value and of society are tightly connected. This is the sense in which “the entrepreneur freed from the political produces the political.” The separation between the economic, as the sphere of production of a-signifying flows and structural relations with nature, and the political, as the production of signifying flows and relations with the other mediated by language, is materially in doubt. The Political Entrepreneur and the State Berlusconi is a political entrepreneur of the same nature as Benetton. He is the expression of new, dynamic and innovative social relations (despite the vulgarity of his imagery and the conformism of the “forms of life” that he stages) and new relations of power, and only in these things does he find his legitimacy. If we fail to consider the structural transformation that Italian society has undergone during the past twenty years, we will have no way to explain the Berlusconi “phenomenon” except as a media coup d’état. Mediaset (formerly Fininvest) is a postFordist enterprise that has nothing to do with “public service” television, with interwar media or even with the media of the “glorious Thirties.” Commercial television is only a point of passage toward the real communicative machine of the post-Fordist assemblage, toward the infobahn or information superhighway, where all the functions required for the control of flows find their real technological realization. If we fail to understand this, we run the risk of saying many stupid things about the media and the power of information. The media do indeed play a fundamental role in this affair, but they are part of a completely different assemblage. In this new assemblage, we don’t watch the same old television and we don’t live with the same old media.19 The post-Fordist social machine explains the nature of the media, and not vice-versa. Berlusconi’s television is a flow of images and sounds directly connected to the new productive networks. It involves a new communicative machine, fully adapted to the new machine for the production of society and to the “mutants”20 that produce it. The new machine of communication has functioned as the mechanism of “subjectification” for small and medium-sized post-Fordist

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enterprises in Italy (but the stress should be on “post-Fordism” and not on “small and medium-sized”). It has functioned as the flywheel of the “construction of the market” for the new industrial fabric of the country. It has been the primary mechanism for the anthropological mutation of the Italian populace. This new machine, in which we can no longer distinguish political flows from productive or social flows, has functioned as the mechanism of capture for new forces and their forms of expression, leading them back to the state. Only a machine of this type, which encourages flows, legitimates some and excludes others through its only code, that of the market (and no longer the old political machine of parties with their ideological codifications), can give strength, legitimacy and dynamism back to the State. It does not intervene a posteriori in a labor of consensus/dissent or legitimation/exclusion brought about by the political. Here, the political and communication reciprocally presuppose one another and articulate their procedures within a single systemic mechanism. The astonishing rapidity with which Berlusconi established himself on the “political” scene is not due to media manipulation, but to the capacity of communicative flows to be sufficiently deterritorialized to be able to traverse the social and immaterial dimensions of post-Fordist capitalism at the same time. The new communicative machine does not primarily produce ideology or propaganda. “Propaganda”21 and manipulation were names given to the subordination of the communicative machine to the political. From this point of view, the political was that which still had the capacity to hierarchize the flows and control them by means of a “despotic” coding. The political was what remained of sovereign power (sovereignty without a sovereign) as the capacity to overdetermine the coding of flows.22 In post-Fordist capitalism, as we have seen àpropos of Berlusconi, no code “external” to the logic of money-capital can overcode and integrate the relations of power. Post-Fordist capitalism requires an absolute immanence of the forms of production, constitution, regulation, legitimation and subjectification. And this is Berlusconi’s weak point, his Achilles’ heel, because he cannot coherently sustain the “absolute immanence” of the production of society that post-Fordism reveals to us as its horizon. What does Berlusconi’s electoral achievement in fact signify? It signifies that the principle of self-constitution inscribed in social activity once again refers back to an external, transcendental foundation and principle of legitimation: the power of the state. The new forms of expression that Italian society has confusedly but consistently

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expressed during those years have been led back to the form of representation, to State subjectification. Whatever the capitalist machine “deterritorializes on one side, it is obliged to territorialize on the other,” and to territorialize it within and by means of the State.23 We are probably about to witness an integration of the communicative machine into the state apparatus (and vice-versa) as well as systematic experimentation with techniques of “control”24 that will give us a “new” form of state. It is certainly not by reviving comfortable phantoms from the past that we will disturb the new forms of domination and exploitation. The phantom of historical fascism has been the only “strong” image that the left has managed to produce to counter Berlusconi. This image is powerless to reveal the new forms of command and subjection. Obviously it is easier to mobilize against 300 skinheads parading around some city in the Veneto than to mobilize against the model of the political entrepreneur that is being constituted in that same region as a set of laboratory experiments. A critique of the political entrepreneur would imply a critique of the left that very few in Italy seem ready to undertake. Translated by Timothy S. Murphy Notes 1. The Italian term “dispositivo” is cognate with the French term “dispositif,” which readers of Michel Foucault will know has no direct equivalent in English. It refers to a complex structure composed of many different kinds of parts: material, discursive, subjective, institutional, etc. For consistency’s sake I have chosen to translate it as “mechanism” throughout this essay, but readers should bear in mind other possible translations, including “apparatus” and “assemblage.” (Translator’s note.) 2. In a well-known scene, Jean-Luc Godard showed that if one removes all the publicity (the enterprise) from a weekly newsmagazine, nothing remains except the director’s editorial (arbitrary power). As in the case of the “traditional” forms of popular communication which, as E.P. Thompson has shown, constituted an important “elsewhere” in the constitution of the working class, the linguistic flows are traversed and reorganized by the forces of the market. This means that the “elsewhere” no longer has any pre-structured “exteriority” on which one could rely once “being” is subordinated to the capital relation. 3. The definition of the “political entrepreneur” has a specific polemical value since economic theory and official politics are based precisely on the separation between the economic and the political. Analogously, in fashionable philosophies this separation is defined as the separation between “instrumental rationality” and “communicative rationality.” 4. To be more precise: in 1988, out of 250,000 people who worked for Benetton, only 2,500 were directly employed by the clothing multinational. And among these directly-employed workers, the classical type of worker (involved above all in coloring and retail) was not the most numerous. Since then, automation has certainly

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affected labor in retail sales, and probably in coloring as well (but regarding this we cannot provide precise data). The new hiring, in contrast, involves the Formula 1 stable. 5. The development of this type of labor (simultaneously “material” and “immaterial” but certainly “independent”) is what characterized the 1980ss in Italy. 6. In Italy the financial flows of public debt, the most deterritorialized and hence the most powerful flows, played a central role in the eighties: it was a matter of “regulating” a production that had already reached levels of immateriality unknown in other countries. The financialization of the economy cannot be a critique of the “rentier.” 7. Obviously the Fordist mode of production and its subjects have not disappeared. During the last round of elections they were represented by the “left” and the big bosses allied under the very same label of “progressives” and “center-left.” The point is that, as always, the capitalist mode of production is a set of different modes of production that is commanded by the most dynamic and deterritorialized mode. 8. The “federalism” of the Lega Nord finds its structural rationale for existence in the “autonomy” of these networks. 9. For an in-depth analysis of Benetton as an enterprise, see Lazzarato, Yann MoulierBoutang, Antonio Negri, and Giancarlo Santilli, Des entreprises pas commes les autres: Benetton en Italie, le Sentier à Paris (Paris: Publisud, 1993). 10. English in original. (Translator’s note.) 11. As we have already had the chance to observe with regard to immaterial production, this means that the “production of subjectivity” has become one of the conditions that must be realized in order to be able to sell. 12. This form of publicity is not opposed to other forms, but integrates them. 13. Serge Daney in Libération, 1 October, 1991. These two articles appeared in response to the release of a Benetton ad showing a newborn baby with its umbilical cord not yet cut. It is interesting to note how such a specialist in images arrives at similar conclusions to ours regarding the strategic and constitutive role of communication. 14. “The self-regulation of the social and free-wheeling interactivity are services that publicity (grown large) provides to the market economy (grown even larger) and to these wars of the third kind. It is a free service, carried out in the eye and for the eye” (Serge Daney). 15. Benetton’s strategy “does not consist, for example, in the simple representation of an ideological line (the clear anti-racism of United Colors) that corresponds to the firm convictions of Luciano himself. It resides instead in the search for a subtle line of dissent, a limit that is internal to collective convictions (and conventions). With the help of small provocative details, it sets out in search of more precise information regarding ideology—no longer the doctrinaire and molar ideology that no longer sells, but the ‘lived experience of ideology,’ its vague inside, its changing traces, its easy contradictions” (Serge Daney). 16. We must not confuse, as Virilio does, the technological machine (with its protosubjectivity, its ontological consistency, and its own alterity) with the abstract machine that establishes itself transversally and connects the machinic levels in an “event-like [evenemenziale]” way. Abstract machines are occurrences [avvenimenti] (“Desert Storm”) or names (“Berlusconi”). 17. “Modern societies undoubtedly needed to have their four truths come from an elsewhere that was within them: the sacred, poetry, art, even war. Politics and ideology successively occupied this ‘other place’ that Bataille calls ‘the accursed share,’ the singular economy of which he sought to study. And in postmodern society, it is indubitable that the conquering plasticity of the market no longer needs to have anything to do with that exteriority [my emphasis], and possesses, by means of publicity that has become social communication, the means to subject society to its own logic” (Serge Daney).

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18. Exploitation is also redefined since, as we have noted, it involves the exploitation of the productive autonomy of independent networks and the processes of subjectivation and individuation. 19. We must be attentive and not dismiss Berlusconi’s television with a presumptuous smile, because it has constructed an “image,” a “style,” a “sensibility” (with game shows, sports, publicity) for the “individual” of post-Fordism. What could an “other” image be? Certainly not one of public service. “Creating an image” is one of the major political problems of post-Fordism. 20. In the 1970s, Pasolini’s analysis of the anthropological impact of television and publicity on the Italian populace anticipated a phenomenon that would find its complete realization in Berlusconi’s communicative machine. 21. For more than a decade, Berlusconi’s television has been a TV of commodities and enterprises, rather than a TV of information: it has functioned on the basis of publicity, game shows and sports. Game shows and sports have become, via television, moments that are constitutive of the ethics of the enterprise. Even when it is authorized (or rather obligated) to broadcast news programs, its ratings have always been lower than those of the public service networks, which are strictly controlled by the parties of the old political system. 22. The same can be said regarding the production of subjectivity. The cinema, as “mass art,” already intended to “open minds,” but that subjectivation was “overcoded” by the political. The comparison with historical fascism or even with “state” overcoding after the Second World War does not account for the great change introduced by the directly capitalist subordination of the communicative flows. 23. The same holds true for subjectivity. The communicative machine must refer the deterritorialization of old forms of subjectivity and identity back to the family and to normality. 24. In the sense that Gilles Deleuze defines it, that is, as the overcoming of “disciplinary” techniques.

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Introduction to an Excerpt from

Maurizio Lazzarato’s The Revolutions of Capitalism The translation below is an excerpt from Maurizio Lazzarato’s book Les révolutions du capitalisme (Paris: Les empêcheurs de penser en ronde, 2004) [The Revolutions of Capitalism]. In this book, Lazzarato analyzes the transition from Fordist “disciplinary” to post-Fordist “control” societies, and from the struggles of the traditional labor movement to those of the contemporary social movements, by invoking a number of concepts from French post-structuralism. Lazzarato’s analysis also builds on the work of French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, and in particular on Tarde’s interpretation of Leibniz. The philosophical theories of Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin provide another important reference point. Opening with reflections on a slogan associated with the protests against the 1999 WTO summit in Seattle—”Another World is Possible”— The Revolutions of Capitalism explores the concepts of the possible and the virtual in order to formulate a critique not just of contemporary capitalism’s regime of exploitation, but also of traditional strategies of resistance. Capitalism’s most recent transformations—and in particular its direct exploitation of intellectual and affective interaction, made possible by the new technologies associated with immaterial labor— require new theories of the event, of subjectivity, and of the ways in which subjectivity is produced—theories that go beyond socialism’s dialectic of the individual and the collective. The traditional Marxist concepts of class, labor, and exploitation need to be re-examined in light of the new configurations of power and resistance characteristic of contemporary capitalism. In the passages translated below, Lazzarato proposes an expansion of the Marxist concept of exploitation and a reconsideration of traditional notions of power, discovering concepts adequate to the reality of contemporary capitalism in the work of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. Max Henninger, translator

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From The Revolutions of Capitalism Maurizio Lazzarato Majority/Minorities The conceptual pair majority/minorities takes account of a subjection that the Marxist concept of exploitation does not allow one to grasp. Now, like the concept of exploitation, the conceptual pair majority/ minorities defines two heterogeneous movements by means of one and the same mechanism [dispositif]: the constitution of minorities as a majority and the constitution of minorities as forms of resistance, as creation of one and the same multiplicity.1 But while exploitation is a dialectical mechanism, the majoritarian model is differential: the conceptual pair exploiter/exploited is symmetrical, whereas the conceptual pair majority/minorities is asymmetrical. In this sense, the differences between these two mechanisms are considerable. Classes are structurally pre-defined, whereas minorities do not preexist their constitution any more than a majority does. The dualisms of class are written into the mode of production, whereas every majority and every minority is an event-like [événementielle] singularization of multiplicity. Exploitation refers to the essence of the subjects involved; the majoritarian model refers to the control exercised over their eventlike becoming. When we use the concept of exploitation, we know in advance who is good (the workers) and who is bad (the capitalists), whereas in the majority/minorities model we are confronted with the uncertainty and unpredictability of what is good and what is bad (a minority is perfectly capable of transforming itself into a majority or of being subordinated to a majority—which is what is happening, for example, to a part of the male homosexual movement). As has been emphasized throughout this work, it’s not a matter of opposing one power relation to another. The majority/minorities model does not replace exploitation, but superimposes itself on it, employing ways of giving consistency to multiplicity that are more mobile and elastic than the power relations characteristic of disciplinary societies, both from the point of view of power and from that of resistance. Two examples will help to illustrate the efficacy, pertinence, and elegance of the conceptual apparatus elaborated by Deleuze and Guattari.

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The first example demonstrates the limits of an approach that conceptualizes the relationship between workers and the power of capital only in terms of exploitation. Workers find themselves in a relation of exploitation when they sell their labor-power to an entrepreneur, but they find themselves implicated in a majoritarian dynamic when, for example, their revenue is invested in pension funds. A number of the largest American pension funds are in fact veritable “worker” insurance firms; they participate in the constitution of the majoritarian model by which finance captures flows of wealth and activity across the entire planet. The logic of finance, which functions according to the majoritarian principle of opinion and not according to the principle of exploitation, blurs the dividing lines between classes by establishing new divisions between those who profit and those who suffer from the accumulation of capital. In the case of the majority, the lines of division are not the same as in that of exploitation. The wage laborers who invest their income in this manner constitute a multiplicity along with other revenue holders, and they help impose this multiplicity as a majority (a bad multiplicity). That shouldn’t surprise us, since, as we’ve learned from Tarde, singularities can participate in different publics and groups at the same time (the incompossible [l’incompossible] is not governed by the logic of contradiction).2 The exploitation of wage laborers is no less real than their participation in the financial majority. Is this then a case of a worker aristocracy that has betrayed its class? Isabelle Stengers suggests that we ought to change our vocabulary, in a world in which different possible worlds proliferate. In her words, we can say that the wage laborers who invest in pension funds are not “guilty,” but “poisoned or bewitched” by finance, just as we are all poisoned or bewitched by advertising, marketing, television, and so on. We have already amply stressed the impossibility of distinguishing an expressive from a corporeal assemblage; we have tried to show that one cannot conceptualize the economy without first conceptualizing marketing, public opinion, and so on—that is, without taking into account mechanisms that function according to the conflictual majority/minorities dynamic, rather than according to the dynamic of exploitation. Our second example will demonstrate how the majoritarian model overdetermines the activity of one of the most important and wealthiest industries of contemporary capitalism: the pharmaceutical industry. Philippe Kourilisky, general manager of the Pasteur Institute, has pointed out that one of the major obstacles to the circulation and production of those pharmaceutical products whose absence causes death

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for millions worldwide is not just an economic obstacle. Nor does it arise from intellectual property laws. As surprising as it may seem, one of the obstacles to meetings global health needs is (bio)ethics. The power held by institutions such as the US’s FDA and Europe’s EMEA—institutions that set the standards for research, development, and manufacture of medicines and vaccines—has a “strong ethical connotation, since they’re charged with protecting the security of persons.”3 A product of the “security-oriented logic of Western nations,” these standards cause the costs of research and development to rise to the point where “poor countries, incapable of meeting these standards, frequently refrain from producing for themselves, even though they would be able to do so.” According to Kourilisky, bioethics has become a genuine locus of power. Its logic is that of the majority (wealthy nations) that subordinates minorities (poor nations) to its criteria of measure (the standards regulating research and development). “Regulatory globalization goes hand-in-hand with the globalization of ethics.” The partisans of a universalizing ethic are at odds with the exponents of an ethics adapted to local situations. They radically reject every notion of a “double standard” that allows a pharmaceutical product to be produced according to non-Western norms (or to use vaccines used in the West until the 1960s, but which do not correspond to present norms as established by the regulatory institutions). “In this manner, regulatory standards and a universalizing ethic meet, to the detriment of poor countries […]. And by what right do we want to export our norms, our judgment, our ethic of wealthy nations to those who lack everything or almost everything?” One cannot properly understand this situation by considering simple economic logic, or by analyzing the organized theft of intellectual property rights. Here again, exploitation results from the interlinking of different logics, each oriented towards different goals—overlapping logics that connect or disconnect in a more or less coherent manner. Pace Rancière, the philosophy of difference does not abandon the “negative,” but rather re-defines it in accordance with the concept of multiplicity and the differential dynamics of refusal and creation we have discussed. When it comes to multiplicity, the “negative” cannot be conceptualized without the conceptual pair majority/minorities.4 To be sure, class relationships and majority-minority relationships co-exist, but it is the latter that are becoming more and more generalized, and that determine, reshape, and subordinate the former, forcing us to re-conceptualize resistance off the beaten track of the labor movement.

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The Living, Resistance, and Power And yet as you understand it, resistance is not just a form of negation: it’s a process of creation; to create and recreate, to transform the situation, to participate actively in the process, that’s what resisting is. […] Yes, that’s how I would define things. Saying no constitutes the minimal form of resistance. Of course there are times when it’s very important. You have to say no and make of that no a decisive form of resistance. – Michel Foucault

The concepts of the living [vivant], resistance, and power change depending upon the ontology according to which they’re formulated. Marxism has conceptualized the living, resistance, and power according to an ontology of the subject/object relation, transferring this relation into politics in the form of the capitalist/worker relation of exploitation. According to this tradition, the living presents itself as labor (“living labor”), that is, as producer of the world and of history. Power is the mechanism that brings about the metamorphosis of the “living” into its opposite: “dead” labor. The subject objectifies itself, reifies itself in a product, a work, and thereby becomes the slave of what it has produced. To come to life again, to once more become the master of its destiny and affirm itself as the subject of history, it has to effect a reversal of reification: the revolution is the reversal of the reversal, the subjectification of dead labor, the metamorphosis of the object into the subject. As we have seen, there is another tradition in modernity, which conceptualizes the architectonics of the world in terms of what Mikhail Bakhtin defines as the self/other relation. The relation between self and other must be understood neither as a relation between a subject and an object nor as a relation between subjects, but rather as an event-like relation between “possible worlds.” The other is neither an object nor a subject; it is the expression of possible worlds. What do the relations between the living, resistance, and power become when one no longer conceptualizes them on the basis of the ontology of the subject, but rather on that of the event-like relation between self and other? Foucault can help us answer this question. In effect, in his final and definitive theory of power, Foucault defines power as action performed upon possible actions, as the capacity to control the ways in which others may conduct themselves. Perceiving power relations as capacities to constitute and define the possible conduct of others allows us to return to what is at stake in the practices, mechanisms, SubStance #112, Vol. 36, no. 1, 2007

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and techniques of power that we have seen at work in the coordinationform, in feminist movements, and in the struggles against neoliberal globalization. At the beginning of the 1980s, Foucault draws a distinction between three different concepts that he had until then subsumed under the single category of power: strategic relations, techniques of government, and states of domination.5 Strategic relations make up a considerable part of human relations and must not be confused with a political structure, a government, a dominant social class, or anything of the kind. They constitute a set of power relations that play out between individuals within a family or a teacher-student, communicative, or romantic relationship. They are infinitesimal, mobile, reversible, and unstable power games that allow the partners involved to put in place strategies for modifying situations. For Foucault, strategic relations have no negative connotations. For example, exercising power over another within a sexual or romantic relationship—where one attempts to dictate the conduct of the other and acts upon the other’s possible actions as part of an open strategic game within which things can always be reversed—”is part of love, of passion, of sexual pleasure.” If power is defined as the capacity to structure the other ’s field of possible actions, then in order to conceptualize the exercise of power one needs to suppose that the forces engaged in the relation are virtually “free.” Power is a mode of acting upon “active subjects,” “upon free subjects qua free subjects.” Within this framework, to say that the subjects are free is to say that they “always have the possibility of changing the situation, that this possibility exists constantly.” States of domination, on the other hand, are characterized by the fact that the strategic relation has stabilized itself within institutions that limit, freeze, and block the mobility, reversibility, and instability of the action performed upon another action. In this way, the asymmetrical relationships that every social relation contains are crystallized and lose the freedom, fluidity, and reversibility of strategic relations. Trade unions, political parties, and State institutions may insist on the democratic character of the procedures that characterize them, but they freeze and block at the outset the ways in which individuals attempt to direct the conduct of others, such that it becomes almost impossible to implement strategies of transformation. Foucault situates technologies or techniques of government in an intermediate region between strategic relations and states of domination. Technologies or techniques of government are the ensemble of practices

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by which one is able to “constitute, define, organize, instrumentalize the strategies that individuals, in their freedom, can implement in their relationships with one another.”6 What these techniques govern is one’s relation to oneself and to others. According to Foucault, techniques of government play a central role within power relations, because it is through them that strategic games can be given a closed or an open character; it is through the exercise of techniques of government that these games crystallize and fix themselves in institutionalized, asymmetrical relations (states of domination) or in fluid and reversible relations, open to the experimentation of subjectivations that escape states of domination. Political action must therefore concentrate on techniques of government. Such action has two major aims: 1. To allow for strategic relations to be played out with as little domination as possible, by giving oneself rules of right (new rights). 2. To increase the liberty, mobility, and reversibility of power games, since this liberty, mobility, and reversibility are the preconditions for resistance, creation, and the experimentation of relationships to oneself and to others. The notion of “techniques of government” helps us to conceptualize in another way the newness of the mechanisms we have seen at work in coordinations, in post-feminist movements, or in the various mobilizations against neoliberal globalization. The techniques of government that organize states of domination (such as marketing, the management of a business enterprise, global “governance,” or workfare) are not the only possible techniques of government. In effect, it is also possible for there to be techniques of government that cut across strategic relations and states of domination transversally. While it is an illusion to believe that there can be social relations without power relations, one mustn’t think that states of domination are inevitable. It’s a question of the techniques employed, if one envisions these techniques as collective constructs. Conceptualizing political action as the construction of techniques for the governing of oneself and of others allows one to render both strategic relations and states of domination “problematic.” It allows one to make them the object of politics, thereby creating the conditions for transforming them. The techniques in question are themselves the means employed in such an act of questioning; they are themselves the locus of experimentation. Experimentation and the transformation of the

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situation can be brought about neither in the exteriority of strategic relations nor in the interiority of states of domination; they trace a line of flight “between” the two, by means of techniques and mechanisms that prevent states of domination from fixing every space for the creation of what is possible, and by giving to strategic relations a new mobility and a new reversibility, a reversibility assured not by the transcendence of the law and of right, or by categorical statements on equality, but by the action of mobile and nomadic institutions such as coordinations. Such new institutions blur the distinctions and the distribution of roles fixed by established power; they allow for subtraction from the dichotomous (or dialectical) alternatives within which we are bound (man/woman, capitalist/worker, citizen/foreigner, worker/unemployed, and so on). This space “between” the microphysics of power and the institutions of domination (a space that is not given, but that must be invented, constructed, cultivated) is propitious for a politics of becoming and creation, for the invention of new forms of subjectivation. In the end, Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari tell us that if one wants to conceptualize and practice the politics of multiplicity, one needs to start from these spaces, these lines that are traced in an always singular manner between the molar and the molecular, between relations of dominance and strategic relations. That’s exactly what social movements do, and what molar institutions (both right-wing and left-wing) refuse to do. And it is the only way of constructing social relations whose horizon is not that of war. Translated by Max Henninger Notes 1. In the same manner, the concept of exploitation defines the production of capital (it is the concept of the production of surplus value) and the production of that which destroys capital (it is the concept of the constitution of the proletariat). 2. “Incompossible” is Leibniz’s term for that which escapes from the possible/impossible binary. (Translator’s note.) 3. Philippe Kourilisky, “L’éthique du Nord sacrifie les malades du Sud.” Le Monde, 8 Feburary 2004. All subsequent quotations are taken from this article. 4. By the same token, the concept of the multitude, while it allows one to conceptualize “an ensemble of singularities,” seems incapable of defining in a non-dialectical manner a principle internal to the dynamic of the multiplicity that corresponds to what is called “division” or the “negative.” In effect, when it becomes necessary to refer to this principle, one applies to the multitude a conceptual apparatus related to classes (one speaks of the “class of the multitude”), instead of examining the relationship between different mechanisms of power and subjectivation. 5, See Foucault, “Deux essais sur le sujet et le pouvoir.” Dits et Écrits, vol. II (Paris: Gallimard, 2001). 6. Foucault 2001 (728).

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Introduction to Antonella Corsani’s

“Beyond the Myth of Woman: The Becoming-Transfeminist of (Post-)Marxism”

Antonella Corsani is an Italian economist who teaches at the Université de Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Multitudes and one of the editors of the collective volumes Vers un capitalisme cognitif [Toward a Cognitive Capitalism] (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001) and L’età del capitalismo cognitivo [The Era of Cognitive Capitalism] (Verona: Ombre corte, 2002). As this essay demonstrates, her work focuses on the changing nature of labor in post-Fordist capitalism, particularly the phenomena of irregular or intermittent work, intellectual or immaterial labor, and the “feminization” of labor. Like many post-workerist thinkers, she takes a broadly global perspective on contemporary issues, combining French post-structuralist philosophy and feminism, Italian political economy, American ethnic and queer activism and post-colonial analysis, to construct a sophisticated theoretical paradigm for interpreting and intervening into current debates over subversive subjectivity and the organization of resistance to global capital. This essay, which reprises many of the themes and methods that emerge in Corsani’s essays for Multitudes, was written especially for this issue of SubStance. Timothy S. Murphy, translator

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Beyond the Myth of Woman: The Becoming-Transfeminist of (Post-)Marxism1 Antonella Corsani … the principle of citations, as Spivak reminds us, echoing Derrida. Letting others speak in my text is not only a way of inscribing my work in a collective political movement; it is also a way of practicing what I preach. The dissolution of steady identities advocated by the poststructuralist generation is no mere rhetorical formula for me: the dethroning of the “transcendental narcissism” of the philosophizing “I” is a point of nonreturn. Letting the voices of others echo through my text is therefore a way of actualizing the noncentrality of the “I” to the project of thinking, while attaching it/her to a collective project. — Rosi Braidotti (1994, 37-38)

This essay is situated at the intersection of two trajectories of critical thought: feminism and post-workerism. In the displacements brought about by feminism, it seeks to grasp the need to rethink the categories of the critique of political economy. The feminism to which I am referring here is essentially that which reconfigured itself following its confrontation with the homosexual and post-colonial movements—a feminism that I will call transfeminism, using a term borrowed from Beatriz Preciado—that is, a feminism that is a thinking of and a political experimenting with multiplicity. I am joining the other trajectory, postworkerism, essentially at the level of the developments that have resulted from the contributions of Maurizio Lazzarato, Christian Marazzi, Yann Moulier Boutang, Antonio Negri and Carlo Vercellone over the past dozen years—their effort to rethink labor, social cooperation, the wage and income today. Despite the different paths followed by these authors, their analyses converge on one essential point: what is emerging from the metamorphoses of capitalism is a new relationship between capital and life, which Christian Marazzi calls “the biopolitical turn of the economy.” Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri speak of “biopolitical labor,” meaning labor that produces not “just material goods but social life itself.” Knowledge, know-how, language and affect are the fundamental stakes in production today, and they imply a new nature of labor within a 107 SubStance #112, Vol. 36, no. 1, 2007

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capitalism with a “feminine” face, for capital’s hold is now being exercised over the sphere of reproduction historically “reserved” for women. By inscribing myself in a somewhat critical (and self-critical) perspective, I seek to extend the displacement of binary categories that feminism has brought about, particularly the displacement of the categories of production and reproduction. Consequently, I want to ask the following questions: Can the category of labor as developed since Marx encompass all the forms that human activity can take? Can the category of living labor still resist once the divisions that subtend it—body/mind, culture/ nature, man/woman—are called into question? Is the separation between living labor and dead labor pertinent, or has the infinite extension of living labor, the displacement of binary divisions such as living labor/ dead labor or productive labor/unproductive labor, instead reached the point where it has become quite unstable, and as a result, inoperative? I will explore this vast worksite by following a little path that is as surprising as the one that links its two figures: the lesbian and the intermittent worker or the “non-jobless unemployed” [non chômeur-non employé]. I. Very Disordered and Undisciplined Multiplicities2 What does “feminist” mean? “Feminist” is formed with the word femme—woman—and means: someone who fights for women. For many of us it means someone who fights for women as a class and for the disappearance of this class. For many others it means someone who fights for woman and her defense—for the myth, then, and its reinforcement. —Monique Wittig (1992, 14)

From the perspective opened up by Monique Wittig, women can become a class only by destroying a myth—the myth of woman. The disappearance of the class (of women) occurs through the destabilization of heterosexuality as a political regime, as a social system of oppression “that produces the doctrine of the difference between the sexes to justify this oppression” (ibid., 20). Conceiving heterosexuality as a political regime allows us to escape from the dialectic of the sexes: female and male are products of the same mechanism of power, to which women are no more external than men are. It is not a matter of uniting as women against men, but of inventing political strategies of deterritorializing “man and woman” in order to “destroy politically, philosophically and symbolically the categories of man and woman.” The assertion that “lesbians are not women” joyfully opposes a radical strategic alternative SubStance #112, Vol. 36, no. 1, 2007

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to emancipation conceived as “escaping from a minority,” as the “affirmation of a joint-sharing in a common world,” as a “demonstration of equality” between the sexes (Rancière, 1995, 48-49). The assertion that “lesbians are not women” is a constitutive act, the condition for opening up other perspectives for political action. It is a matter of using “our strategic position to destroy the heterosexual system,” says Louise Turcotte (Wittig, 2001, 39). “Not only are we not women, but we don’t have to become them,” adds Marie-Hélène Bourcier (ibid., 39). One is not born a woman, and we don’t have to become women.3 The category of sex does not refer to any natural disposition, to some oft-claimed biological essence/difference, but is instead an absolutely political category; female-male sexual difference is an eminently political binary articulation, the product of oppression, just like racial difference. Feminism thus contributes to the radical questioning of the nature/culture division on which Western thought as well as critical thought is based. “Lesbian,” writes Monique Wittig, “is the only concept I know of that is beyond the categories of sex (woman and man) because the designated subject (lesbian) is not a woman, either economically, or politically, or ideologically” (1992, 20). Dis-identification with “woman” is the absolutely basic position both for destroying the idea that women are a natural, homogeneous, innocent group, and for creating other possibilities beyond this world that would like to be the only one possible—this world that produces man, woman and women as an oppressed class. Lesbians are not women, and like fugitive slaves they flee their class. This is Albert Hirschmann’s “exit,” but even more Gilles Deleuze’s line of flight: “to flee,” writes Deleuze, “is not to renounce action; nothing is more active than a flight” (Deleuze and Parnet, 36). According to Wittig, feminism is engaged in demonstrating that “supposedly ‘subjective,’ ‘individual,’ ‘private’ problems are in fact social problems, class problems; that sexuality is not for women an individual and subjective expression, but a social institution of violence.” “The personal is political”: this is surely the key concept of feminism that makes it a power that overflows the “shores of politics” and compels us to seek new answers to the question, what is politics? (1992,19). Monique Wittig’s figure of the lesbian is not a figure of the trinity; it is not the Holy Spirit; and it is not, as Diane Griffin Chowder emphasizes, “the third gender” (166). It is, as Jacques Derrida says, the figure that allows a “displacement of binary oppositions.” Homosexual positioning does not re-institute a binary articulation that would oppose heterosexual to homosexual. As Teresa de Lauretis points out, if at one time lesbians were not women, today some of them do consider

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themselves women, while others call themselves butch or femme and still others prefer to call themselves queer or transgendered, and so on (35). The dis-identification with woman thus appears as a moment in the process of differentiation of sexual identities—the beginning of a proliferation of hybrids. Further, Wittig writes, “maybe we must do without the admirable instrument of the dialectic,”4 and it is precisely by doing without and surpassing the dialectic that queer theories5—of which Wittig’s work can be considered a precursor—withdraw from the materialist lesbian feminism that is trapped in a logic of binary oppositions (homosexual/ heterosexual) whose resolution must be dialectical. As Beatriz Preciado writes, “Queer theories work with a transversal notion of oppression in which power is neither articulated nor resolved by means of dialectical oppositions” (2003, 40). Feminist, post-feminist and queer politics allow us to think politics after the dialectic and beyond the dominant sex/ gender regime. There is not just one single feminism, but multiple feminisms. Usage of the singular is only justified, as Wittig puts it, by the will to “assert that our movement has a history, and to emphasize the link with the first feminist movement” and thereby to accept all the ambiguities that the word “feminism” conceals. But the singular will never be a homogeneous unity, since as Donna Haraway argues in her response to Sandra Harding, “There is no single feminist standpoint because our maps require too many dimensions for that metaphor to ground our visions” (196). All the same, as Teresa de Lauretis emphasizes, the term “feminist theory” does not refer to a unity but rather to a process of knowledge, a function of historical specificities just like the contradictory confrontation of different, differentiated, situated practices and positionings (see her Soggetti eccentrici). The multiplicity of critical positionings and practices, as much on the plane of theory as on the plane of strategies, renders feminism irreducible to unity. The history of feminism is also a history of ruptures. Post-feminism has been the mode of marking rupture brought about by what Teresa de Lauretis calls the “feminist critique of feminism”—a critique constructed at the intersection of post-colonial thought, black feminism, homosexual movements, and lesbian feminism. Adriana Cavarero accounts for it in the following terms: The use of “post” arises from the will to affirm the existence of a theoretical barrier, a sharp and powerful rupture that separates what comes before from what comes after. Before, there was the phallogocentric subject; afterward, there are multiple and fragmented multiplicities that open up the territory for feminist critique. Before,

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there is the long history of the binary economy; afterward, there is the liberating whirlwind that destabilizes the dichotomous codes of this economy. (94)

Nevertheless, the use of “post” does not refer to a temporal dimension, to a rupture in some sort of natural history of feminism; instead, it must be grasped as the index of a displacement of the subject “woman” toward a complex and heterogeneous multiplicity of feminist subjectivities. Faced with contestation within feminism from “women of color,” Chicanas, and Jewish women as much as from lesbians, transgenders and transsexuals, feminism has had to account for the presence of power relations that cannot be understood using concepts of gender and sexual difference. “Simultaneity of oppressions” (Barbara Smith), the intersection of power relations, “transversality of oppression” (Preciado)—the category “woman” is as awkward (Wittig) as it is unstable (de Lauretis). Feminist theory is thus led to define the multiple figures of feminist subjectivity by means of a non-exhaustive series of qualifiers referring to class, color, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. The list never ends, as Judith Butler says: This failure, however, is instructive: what political impetus is to be derived from the exasperating ‘etc.’…? … It is the supplément, the excess that necessarily accompanies any effort to posit identity once and for all. This illimitable et cetera offers itself as a new departure for feminist political theorizing. (182-83).

Transformed by the encounter with lesbian and gay studies, with post-structuralism—in particular with Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze—and with post-colonial thought, feminist thought is becoming “feminist political theorizing.” It has no “nationality;” it is mestiza; it is becoming in a borderland. As Gloria Anzaluda writes, A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravessados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulatto, the half-breed, the half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the “normal.” (25).

Thus feminism is plural, but in a double sense: first, the plurality of feminisms, and second, a political philosophy of multiplicity. The principle of biological, ontological difference having been called into question by approaches that deconstruct the very concept of “woman” in favor of a political thought of differential differences, of very disordered and undisciplined sexual, ethnic and racial multiplicity; one could speak, as Beatriz Preciado does, of “transfeminism”—that is, “the form that feminism takes when it runs the risk of situating itself within

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multiplicity.”6 What is in question here is precisely feminist political theorizing as the political theory of disordered and undisciplined multiplicity, as the politics of confused multitudes, or rather the specific and fundamental contribution of feminism to political experiments with multiplicity, the displacements that ethnic and sexual minorities bring about, the displacement of categories, discourses, forms of politics and borders. Paraphrasing Wittig (1992, 4), we could then pose the following question: is Marxism willing to reverse itself in order to comprehend that which calls it into question? Is the concept of the multitude, as a class concept,7 the expression of a Marxism that would allow itself to be vampirized by transfeminism? II. Chaotic Processes in the Proliferation of Post-Identitarian Identities As a result of the deconstruction of the woman subject of historical feminism undertaken by the anti-racist and homosexual movements, and as a result of the fact that gays, lesbians, transgenders, transsexuals, women of color and Chicanas are becoming subjects of enunciation, multitudes without identities are emerging from the masses by destabilizing the order of the multiplicity and of the disciplined heterogeneities. Wouldn’t the multitude, then, be the proliferation of postidentitarian identities? Post-identitarian identities, a “foreign” and “aporetic” category that would define a logic and practice of the “construction of a belonging that would not be an assignment to an identity but rather an engagement in a becoming” (Lazzarato, 205). As Teresa de Lauretis reminds us, the African-American Combahee River Collective was the first to theorize an identity politics, in the 1970s.8 Despite being feminists and lesbians, and in the face of the separatist pretensions of white feminists, the members of that collective insisted upon their solidarity with black men in the struggle against racism. As bell hooks said, “It’s easy to give up an identity, when you got one.”9 Gloria Anzaldua writes, “Mi identidad chicana està forgiada en la historia de la resistencia de la mujer india. Los rituales de luto de la mujer azteca eran ritos de desafio para protestar contra los cambios culturales que rompieron la iqualidad y el equilibrio entre mujeres y varones, y protestar contra su desplazamiento a estatus inferior, su denigracion.”10 With ethical vigor, the originary culture is here transformed into a vital expression, as Rosi Braidotti emphasizes in Nuovi soggetti nomadi. But such identities are contradictory, partial, transitory, strategic: “With the hardwon recognition of their social and historical constitution, gender, race and class cannot provide the basis for belief in ‘essential’ unity,” writes Donna Haraway in “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1991, 155). Feminist and queer SubStance #112, Vol. 36, no. 1, 2007

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post-feminist identities are not fixed, congealed identities; rather, they are shifting identities—Teresa de Lauretis’s eccentric subjects, Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic subjects, the hybrid, mestiza, negotiated identities of the young migrant women of the second generation of whom Nirmal Puwar speaks (19). They are Donna Haraway’s fractured, cyborg identities, the deviant identities of queer theory, Judith Butler’s nonnatural, non-ontological, constructed identities, post-national, postgender and post-identitarian identities. Thus, writes Marie-Hélène Bourcier apropos of queer practices, “Some practice politics of differences, others politics of the multitudes, but what is certain is the fact that queer thought and practices are located on the side of the multiplication of identities and post-identities, indeed on the side of the mechanisms for the production and de-production of identities” (2003, 98). If this is possible from a theoretico-political point of view, it is not just because these feminisms have deconstructed the subject “woman” in order to think “women,” in order to think sexual and gender hybridizations and mixings, but also because of the fact of thinking each individual as a multiplicity, which makes it possible to think fractured, uncongealed, shifting and deviant identities. Thus Alice Walker writes, “We are the African and the trader. We are the Indian and the settler. We are oppressor and oppressed” (545). “We are the mestizos of North America. We are black, yes, but we are ‘white,’ too, and we are red. To attempt to function as only one, when you are really two or three, leads, I believe, to psychic illness: ‘white’ people have shown us the madness of that” (540). Thus it involves thinking each individual—and being thought—as a multiplicity, as multiple in our possibility of being simultaneously inside and outside, inhabiting several worlds in contradictory ways. Unity with others, then, could only be a process of partial (and never totalizing) assemblages. The “we” would be the result of a negotiation, opening up other collective becomings in the here and now. Post-identitarian identity politics are not the politics of identitarian or communitarian enclosure; rather, they proceed from a de-ontologization of, a dis-identification with the identities assigned by disciplinary techniques (of control) that order heterogeneities and differences and, at the same time, they necessitate strategic identifications according to a chaotic movement.11 In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari write, “chaos is characterized less by the absence of determinations than by the infinite speed with which they take shape and vanish” (42). It is in this sense that we can think the proliferation of post-identitarian identities: as a chaotic process.

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Why do I consider it so important to stress this point? First, because the question of post-identitarian identity strategies is a way of thinking multitudes differently, thinking the possible transformation of ordered multiplicity into confused multitudes. Because it seems to me that accounting for the proliferation of post-identitarian identities is one of the preconditions for surpassing the two limits that Gayatri Spivak sees in the notion of the Multitude elaborated by Hardt and Negri in Empire— namely, the fact that it is a concept that, although non-naturalized, is hardly “operative in the field.” In other respects, the Multitude may well be the alternative in the midst of Empire, but the Empire of which the authors speak is conceived with hardly any account of “subaltern” countries. “If we admit,” says Spivak, “that Empire does not operate in the same way everywhere and that its impact differs depending on which social strata or countries are implicated, it becomes difficult to think the concept of a homogeneous multitude” (21). We might add that the multitude appears damnably asexual here. Must we repeat it? Michel Foucault has forcefully demonstrated that exploitation does not exhaust the forms of domination, since the different forms of domination are superimposed upon and interact with one another. This is not the concept of creolization so dear to Edouard Glissant,12 which would allow us to escape with a pirouette; instead, it would have to be measured against the concept of mixing [métissage] that puts sexuated bodies and everything that resists the creolization of the body into play.13 The “common” of the multitude cannot be sought in the lowest common denominator given, such as the common essence of exploitation. Common ground is the very object that has to be constructed politically, by fully accepting the task of accounting for the “simultaneity of oppressions,” as what I (following Preciado) have been calling transfeminism does—even if it means taking the risk of falling back into the Marxist reductionism contained in the concept of class and in the theory of conflict as class struggle. This is a good moment to recall that extremely luminous page of Wittig’s essay “Homo Sum” in which she writes, Marx and Engels, in summarizing all the social oppositions in terms of class struggle and class struggle only, reduced all the conflicts under two terms. This was an operation of reduction that did away with a series of conflicts that could be subsumed under the appellation of “capital’s anachronisms.” Racism, antisemitism and sexism have been hit by the Marxian reduction. The theory of conflict that they originated could be expressed by a paradigm that crossed all the Marxist “classes.” (1992, 48)

Here I would like to develop another rationale for understanding the meaning and importance of post-identitarian identity strategies, by referring again to the work of Beatriz Preciado and Marie-Hélène Bourcier, who have forcefully contributed to the demolition of protectionist SubStance #112, Vol. 36, no. 1, 2007

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cultural barriers in France—barriers that have long blocked the translation of post-feminist and queer political/theoretical production coming from the US, and which are responsible for the almost total absence of translations of theoretico-political productions elaborated by post-colonial thought in general and, a fortiori, post-colonial feminist thought. Beatriz Preciado emphasizes the risks of a liberal reading, which is unfortunate but possible, of Michel Foucault.14 The risk is that of thinking multitudes in opposition to identitarian strategies. The multitude could then be thought as a unified and homogeneous set of “equal” individuals. This would constitute a major mystification by concealing the privileges of the majority that has no need to name its identity, since it is dominant. In other words, such a conception of the multitude would contain the political limit of Marx’s concept of class: the annihilation of different subjectivities, the failure to account for power relations within the class. In this same sense, Marie-Hélène Bourcier foresees the possible perception in France of queer positionings as the radical politics of the production of post-identitarian sexual, racial and class identities (2003, 102). Identitarian strategies are immediately rejected in the name of “communitarian drift” by French republican universalism, which rejects every identitarian politics except its own.15 Thus identitarian/post-identitarian strategies must also be grasped as the destabilization of the identity that is not named, the identity of the one-universal [UN-iversal]. They are also opposed to the abolitionist theses that would have us believe that we are living in a post-gender era.16 Trans-feminism has taken seriously the philosophy of difference, while the philosophy of difference has grasped the range and meaning of the politics of feminist, homosexual and post-colonial movements. If differences are a product of oppression, then the strategies of disidentification and proliferation of post-identitarian identities, following a process of repetitions and infinitesimal variations, are not explosions or atomizations. But they cannot be integrated in the name of the lowest common denominator. Multitudes are rhizomatic connections in the process of their becoming. III. Apropos of the Multitude In 1971 Mario Tronti, one of the principal theoreticians of Italian workerism, published the book Operai e capitale [Workers and Capital]. A passage drawn from this work can help us to appreciate the radical reversal that this Marxist current produced and the political range of that reversal: “We too have considered capitalist development to be primary, and workers’ struggles to be only secondary. This is a mistake. The problem must be reversed by changing its sign and starting over SubStance #112, Vol. 36, no. 1, 2007

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from the beginning—and the beginning is the working class’s struggle” (89).17 The history to be constructed, then, is not that of capital, but that of the working class and its struggles. This struggle explains the history of capital, and not the other way around, as Marxism has always done. Wishing to remain faithful to this revolutionary move at the very heart of Marxism, we could ask if the authors of Empire (2000) and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004) should not have begun with the Multitude, rather than as they did, with Empire, and thus with the socalled “anachronisms of capital.” Perhaps they should have begun with an account of the simultaneity and transversality of oppressions in the multitude, the complexity of power relations, but also with resistances and insubordinations, and the rhizomatic connections among these resistances and insubordinations—the rhizomatic connection of ideas, gestures, words, groups, and minorities that escape from the mortifying mythology that consists in thinking that domination is absolute, but also from the blindness that consists in continuing to think that the only domination is that of capital, that exploitation exhausts the forms of power, that power is located in a single site. The beginning is the struggle of the queer, post-colonial and also post-Fordist multitudes, and the result is certainly not the development of capital, following the “bad dialectic between struggle and development” to which Italian workerism leads. These are the same concepts of progress and development called into question by these struggles. The authors of Multitude tell us that the Multitude is a class concept.18 They take into account, of course, the multiplicity of differences (ethnic or community membership, geographical location, gender, sexuality, as well as other factors)—a multiplicity of differences that are not uniformly related to the economic order and that mark the plurality of social classes. But what seems most striking is the fact that this conception of difference is so damnably static. Differences are naturalized and essentialized. They are not becoming by means of a process that is already political—that is, the chaotic process examined above. What is at stake in the definition of the multitude as a class concept is, we are told, the fact that “class itself is defined politically […] class is determined by class struggle […] class is also a political concept […] class is really a constituent deployment, a project […] This political project is what most fundamentally divides Marx’s binary class conception from the liberal models of class pluralism” (Hardt and Negri, 104-05.). So far we are still in Marx, and still confronted with the “anachronisms of capital” whose resolution would have to come from the proletariat’s taking of power. Nevertheless, in the pages that follow, the “anachronisms of capital” are resolved in the multitude

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as a concept that “is meant to repropose Marx’s political project of class struggle” (ibid., 105). What is the multitude? An irreducible multiplicity; the singular social differences that constitute the multitude must always be expressed and can never be flattened into sameness, unity, identity or indifference. The multitude is not merely a fragmented and dispersed multiplicity […] The fracturing of modern identities, however, does not prevent the singularities from acting in common” (ibid.)

By speaking of fracturing, they set the differences into motion, but it is too bad that they do not grasp the political dimension of this motion and the subjectivities that produce it. Above all, they do not grasp how these subjectivities act in the direction of a displacement of binary oppositions to the point that these very oppositions become inoperative. On the contrary, the authors of Multitude seek to lead these deviant subjectivities back to the binary: the multitude and capital, the multitude defined in relation to capital. If the concept of the multitude as a class concept is, according to Hardt and Negri, a biopolitical concept, simultaneously economic and political, then the political is immediately led back to the figure of labor. “One initial approach is to conceive the multitude as all those who work under the rule of capital and thus potentially as the class of those who refuse the rule of capital. The concept of the multitude is thus very different from that of the working class,” since the working class was that which was directly subordinated to the rule of capital, a group from which housewives, independent workers, peasants and the unemployed were excluded, while the multitude will include all forms of labor (ibid., 106). The concept of the multitude is thus an extension or rewriting of the concept of the “socialized worker” elaborated by Negri— a concept that conceives the territory as the site of production of the “socialized worker,” the figure of labor that emerges from the disappearance of the boundary between the factory and its outside. The figure of the worker will, according to the authors, encompass everyone: “In contrast to the exclusions that characterize the concept of the working class, then, the multitude is an open and expansive concept. The multitude gives the concept of the proletariat its fullest definition as all those who labor and produce under the rule of capital” (ibid., 107). But subjectivity is only thought on the basis of the labor-subject. In other words, we are all workers under the rule of capital, which is what makes us political subjects. What would make us a multitude is our common refusal of capital’s rule. If the refusal of work was a possible strategic perspective in the 1970s, today it is impossible since we are productive even when we are sleeping or making love. Flight is no longer possible. How, then,

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are we to refuse capital’s rule? How are we to produce beyond the rule of capital? We are all potentially multitude, but we are all under (and within) the rule of capital. And if instead we tried to say, “No, I am not a worker, and I don’t have to become one, and I no longer have to become unemployed, or a precarious worker, or an inactive one,” what then? Another question: are we all equal under the rule of capital? If we are not all equal under the rule of capital—and we are not—what constitutes our “commonality” that permits us to think and act as a multitude? According to our two authors, it is a question of seeking, by means of empirical analyses, “the common conditions of those who can become the multitude” (ibid., 105). The authors seek this “commonality” of the multitude in immaterial labor—that is, the hegemonic forms of labor that arise after the end of the hegemony of industrial labor. What is immaterial labor? “Labor that creates immaterial products, such as knowledge, information, communication, a relationship or an emotional response […] we call the other principal form of immaterial labor ‘affective labor’” (ibid., 108). To gain more clarity, but without continuing to analyze this book (which is not the objective of this article), it is worthwhile at this point to recall two things. The first is what Hardt and Negri understand by “hegemonic”—a concept that does not refer to a numerically dominant form, but rather to one that is emerging qualitatively as a “tendency” that imposes itself on all forms of labor and on the whole of society. The question that arises at this stage, then, is how do we know if we should seek the multitude in this pattern that is becoming a new “norm” of labor, or if, instead, we should seek it in everything that does not fit into the norm—everything that flees the norm, seeking the direction of failures, of those I would call “economic abnormals”—the direction of those who act in the “borderlands” according to an inside/outside logic, or even the direction of the “interstices” as Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers conceive them?19 This does not mean falling into the ideology of the margins, but, rather, seizing agency. Agency lies in “the possibility of a variation on repetition” (Butler, 185). The subject does not pre-exist the action; instead it is constructed in and by the act, by affirming itself as a creative force, and creation lies in this possibility of a variation on the repetition. But more fundamentally, I see a major risk there—the risk of simply incorporating feminist and post-colonial critique, a sort of indifference toward the cacophony that produced decolonization, in the sense that the critique is incorporated but does not modify or reconfigure the analytic schema. And the very concept of the hegemonic form of labor poses problems if one recalls the aporias to which the analysis of industrial labor as a

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hegemonic form leads: the impossibility of grasping the multiplicity of processes and forms of life that are invented in the spaces of the “anachronisms of capital.” The second point to which I would draw attention concerns the references that the authors give for identifying the traits of “affective labor.” They are thus going to integrate into their concept the labor that Marx did not take into account because it was not exchanged with capital and was not done for a wage—that is, the labor of reproduction (of the species and of labor-power) undertaken by women. But they do so in the following way: this new hegemonic form of labor will be defined as “kin work,” “caring labor,” “maternal work”— in short, labor that is “naturally” feminine. Therefore, the task with which feminism—but we should speak instead of transfeminism—ever since Viginia Woolf’s day has been charged in its struggles, namely to kill “the angel in the house,” returns as a myth. And we are to expect to see realized Marxist feminist Nancy Hartsock’s utopian dream of a world in which women’s activities are generalized and thus bring about the possibility of a “completely human community.”20 And then if, following Hardt and Negri’s analysis, everything becomes labor and is within capital, must we conclude that capital is “becoming-woman”? Should we not instead change the mode of exposition by accepting the radical impossibility of re-essentializing or re-naturalizing the category of sex and by assuming the consequences that this implies for the very concept of labor? IV. Labor, Freedom and Income Before that I had made my living by cadging odd jobs from newspapers, by reporting a donkey show here or a wedding there; I had earned a few pounds by addressing envelopes, reading to old ladies, making artificial flowers, teaching the alphabet to small children in a kindergarten…But what still remains with me as a worse infliction…was the poison of fear and bitterness which those days bred in me. To begin with, always to be doing work that one did not wish to do, and to do it like a slave, flattering and fawning, not always necessarily perhaps, but it seemed necessary and the stakes were too great to run risks… — Virginia Woolf (37-38)

The western economies are characterized by a double process, one that equally implicates the economies of the east and south: a growing use of wage relations [salarisation] and, at the same time, a flexibilizing of employment along with a resulting precariousness of living conditions,

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a veritable pauperization among wage-earners. Wage labor, while imposing itself on everyone, is far from being a guarantee of access to a decent standard of living. Out of this double process of expanding wage relations and flexibilizing emerges a multiplicity of “economic abnormals”: the unemployable, welfare recipients [assistées], non-workers [inactifs], the handicapped, those without qualifications or professional credentials, the inept, the old, the sick, the unemployed, precarious workers, students, researchers who cannot find knowledges to sell on the knowledge market, bastard artists or artists without credentials, documented or undocumented immigrants, sex workers. This mass does not constitute a smooth space, but rather a striated space—one fashioned by complex relations of gender, sex, race, ethnicity and age. It involves many heterogeneous singularities that do not answer—and each in its own way—to the injunction “You must be a good, capable worker.” It involves what we might call, paraphrasing Judith Butler, “economic failures.” How can we displace the dominant forms of knowledge that stigmatize the “failures,” the “economic abnormals,” and class them in the category of the “supernumerary” [le surnuméraire]? Quoting Larry Mitchell, Starhawk writes, “It is categories in the mind and guns in their hands that keep us enslaved” (174). If the category of the “supernumerary” is such a gun in their hands, “a machine for manufacturing people who are ready to do anything in order to avoid falling into that category,”21 many other categories are also in our minds to make their guns effective. Among them, the category “labor” is particularly central and problematic and has been so from the moment in western culture when labor came to constitute that which gives a person dignity and a social identity, that which allows the person to join humanity. Human life, writes Italian Marxist Claudio Napoleoni, has other dimensions on which to found a “dignified existence.” The category of labor is problematic and has been so from the moment when, in Marx, labor became what Maurizio Lazzarato calls that “activity that is constitutive of the world. Labor is not a simple, determinate economic activity, but rather praxis—that is, the production of the world and the self, a generic activity not merely of the worker but of human beings in general” (13). Labor as a category is so problematic that western culture bears within itself all the ambiguity of the statement, “Work is freedom.” Geneviève Fraisse, a philosopher and historian who has dedicated most of her work to the question of women, has analyzed the meaning of the ambiguity this formula conceals: the fact that labor (and women’s access to wage labor) is a condition of emancipation and, at the same time, a factor of enslavement (as wage labor). Thus, in women’s history, access to work (understood in its accepted modern sense as wage labor), SubStance #112, Vol. 36, no. 1, 2007

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which is to say winning the right to work (and thus to a job), would be that which allows one to secure the means of subsistence, to win economic independence, and at the same time that which allows one to emancipate oneself in the sense of possibly gaining autonomy—that is, independence vis-à-vis the institution of the family, at the price of the enslavement that is part of wage earning. Only in this sense, the sense of winning autonomy and independence, is it possible to understand the positive political meaning of a statement as ambiguous and disturbing as “Work is freedom”— “a formula that has been used in different ways for over a century to support emancipation or to impose servitude,” as Fraisse notes (544). In Marx, to the extent that it operates in a determinate historical situation (capitalism), labor has been turned into something other than the way it is realized in human life. And if he defended the idea that the emancipation of women occurs through labor, it is a fact that labor has two faces: it is a factor of alienation, but also a factor of emancipation. For women, Fraisse argues, this tension does not operate within the sphere of production, as it does for men, but between the two spheres of production and reproduction. In the sphere of reproduction, what is at stake is women’s freedom. Women have always worked, as emancipationist feminism asserts, but on the one hand, as “homemakers” or collaborators with their husbands they were considered non-workers, and on the other hand, they had no access to money in the sense that they had no right to manage their own goods and could only practice a profession with the consent of their husbands. Thus Fraisse observes that “women’s work is a massively obvious fact as well as a problem,” and she adds that the problem lies in the figure of the woman worker: “the woman worker becomes a problem because she then [in the nineteenth century] established the opposition between private and public, between the family and work” (543). The cause of the problem was the questioning by the feminist movements of the “naturalness” of the sexual division of labor and the labor status that women had without a corresponding wage. The cause of the problem was the questioning of the social conditions, the disciplinary mechanisms of control by which this division/separation legitimated the nonremuneration of a form of labor corresponding to a sphere considered by political economy—including the Marxist critique of political economy— to be outside of the economic. The cause of the problem was the questioning of the oft-proclaimed heterogeneity of production and reproduction, and the separation between private and public. Fraisse then locates the subversive character of feminist analyses in the demands for monetary recognition of the value of the domestic labor of reproduction: “taking note of the analogy between production and SubStance #112, Vol. 36, no. 1, 2007

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reproduction, they would demonstrate that the fundamental issue was the unpaid status of domestic labor” (551). But from the feminist point of view, specifically the viewpoint of the European feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the solution did not lie in obtaining a wage corresponding to the labor of reproduction (of the species and of laborpower); it was not a matter of demanding monetary recognition for wealth produced, but rather of winning the conditions of freedom, even by means of wage labor. In the 1970s, the feminist movements attacked the model of Fordist/ Keynesian growth. As Christian Marazzi’s analysis has shown, the crisis of Fordism was intimately bound up with the emergence of feminist movements, in the sense that the struggles against the sexual division of labor—which feminists showed to be a social construction, a political mechanism of control over women’s freedom—destabilized the welfare state and its corollary, familial welfare. Marazzi recognizes in the welfare state the first political experiment with a social income of existence or bio-income [biorevenu], a social investment in the biological reproduction of labor-power; as he further emphasizes, welfare also ensured the continuity of capital’s cycle of valorization.22 But the welfare state, above all when configured according to Bismarckian models of social protection, could only function by preserving the sexual division of labor. To recognize feminist struggles as struggles against welfare is to recognize the power of a movement against the institutional compromise that ties us to the welfare state and connects the capitalist enterprise, the state and the family. The meaning of this “revolution” at the heart of the western world can be grasped by examining what these struggles also reveal: the sad myth of full employment (a full employment that means only full male employment, and even then only a certain category of males)—a situation that assigned social rights to a twin category consisting of the wage labor of men plus the subjection of women, both genders constrained to marriage and normative sexuality. Welfare was that economic but above all biopolitical mechanism that consolidated the heteronormative regime and trapped women in the “house,” the domestic space which was, we must remember, becoming a space of high technology as a result of consumer products (from the washer and dryer to the dishwasher, etc.) and, far from being the mythical space of affect and loving care, was a space of enclosure and violence. By killing the “angel in the house,” the feminist movements destabilized the welfare state and revived the political figure of the witch. Who were the witches? The archetype of rebellion in every framework, witches were sages, doctors, practitioners of other knowledges who could no longer find a place in the redistribution of knowledge that scientific SubStance #112, Vol. 36, no. 1, 2007

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positivism brought about.23 Witches were women without husbands who refused marriage, figures of a sexuality that resisted normalization, a sexuality that did not find its goal in procreation, but in a nonproductive, deviant sexuality. Witches were also figures of homosexuality, of nomadic sexuality. As Michela Zucca has noted, they also represented “the cardinal element of continuity, the charismatic leaders and spokespeople of a society and culture that were essentially anti-productive, in the capitalist sense of the term” (292). The persecution of witches, as Starhawk demonstrates, is linked to three interlocking processes: “the expropriation of land and natural resources; the expropriation of knowledge, and the war against the consciousness of immanence” (189). She adds, “Western culture bases its ethics and its justice on the stories of estrangement…The ethics of immanence encourage diversity rather than sameness in human endeavors, and within the biological community” (33, 38). If the enclosure of communal land compels those who had lost their source of independent living to submit to wage relations and thus to construct the history of western economy over the past several centuries, then the persecution of the witches is a war on immanence. “If twentieth-century barbarism is not the same as the barbarism of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,” writes Esther Cohen, “their common origin is beyond doubt: both cases involve a ‘violent’ allergic reaction to radical alterity, a negation of the other as absolutely other, who is called Jew, witch, woman, black, or native” (132). Thus a reading of feminist struggles solely from the angle of work and the sexual division of labor is a highly reductive operation that prevents one from grasping the displacements that these struggles have produced on the plane of knowledges and around the political issue of their production. The sexual division of labor and the separation between production and reproduction are only corollaries of sexual difference insofar as they are products of oppression. Feminism uncovers the mechanisms of power concealed by the scientific discourses on difference and sex, on nature and culture. Above all, the question posed here is the following: what concept of labor can we retain once all the divisions/ separations that founded it are destabilized? Furthermore, such a reading prevents one from grasping the destabilization of the institutions of capitalism, and first among them the bourgeois family; it prevents one from grasping the impact of a revolution in the conception and practices of sexuality that is irreducible to sexual difference. “Power,” Foucault writes, “does not operate in one single site but in multiple sites: the family, sexual life, the treatment of the mad, the exclusion of homosexuals, relations between men and women…all these relations are political relations” (2001, 473). Feminism will act at the level of these relations by SubStance #112, Vol. 36, no. 1, 2007

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radically destabilizing the capitalist order of the so-called “virtuous growth” of the postwar period that reigns throughout the western world. Finally, an “economistic” reading of feminist struggles prevents one from grasping the “other as absolutely other” in its becoming-multiplicity, a becoming in which the feminist movements of the 1970s constituted a moment and the opening of a space of possibility, as did the movements of ethnic and homosexual minorities in the US. Since the crisis of Fordism, unemployment and precarious employment have been established as norms of wage labor, but far from being strictly economic phenomena, unemployment and precariousness are the results of a societal upheaval, as Margaret Maruani and Emmanuèle Reynaud convincingly argue.24 Thus, for example, during the period 1965-1996 in France, the percentage of women employed has risen from 43 to 78 percent. In the US during the same period, this percentage grew similarly: from 45 to 76 percent. The near-explosive growth of women’s presence on the labor market has spawned studies and research from several directions. A first approach seeks to denounce the wage and career discrimination women face on the labor market. A second approach, not too distant from the work of Hardt and Negri, involves grasping the new nature of labor by means of some sort of feminine model of labor that would become a common matrix for everyone. The feminization of labor is often mentioned in order to account for the confusion between production and reproduction that is scrambling the categories of political economy, and making the borders between the time and space of life and those of so-called “productive” labor seem to disappear, in order to account for the phenomenon of “setting affect to work” or “setting life to work.”25 Does the fact that the borders between labor and non-labor are being effaced mean that everything is becoming labor? The question I am raising is not new, and elsewhere, while inscribing my work within the kind of Marxism of which I spoke earlier, I have tried to point out the erasure of the border between labor time and life time. All of life has become productive for (and within) capital, which leads to the justification of the legitimacy of a guaranteed income for all, unconditionally, as a monetary recognition of the wealth produced, even though it is outside of the realm of business.26 If the concept of “guaranteed income” can act as a factor that destabilizes the category of labor, one that brings about a displacement of the hegemonic discourse on employment and unemployment, can it translate the multiplicity of groups that are rising against the capitalization of the living? Can it express a heteroglossia without claiming to be a common language? These

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are the questions I am posing today, along with the question of what perspective one should adopt in order to think about guaranteed income.

V. Some Hypotheses Without claiming to provide definitive and perfectly coherent answers, and as part of a critical and self-critical process, I want to risk advancing several contradictory hypotheses that will open up some rather different perspectives. My point of departure will be an analysis that bears not so much on the structure of the labor market as on the metamorphoses of capitalism, the nature of labor, and the modes of valorization of the various capitals. According to these analyses, the entry of women into the so-called sphere of production would have contributed significantly to the cultural modification of the nature of labor by introducing into it the characteristics proper to the social reproduction of life: interrelationality, flexibility as an intelligent response to the unforeseen, creativity, subjectivity, and the heterogeneity of tasks as so many characteristics that could not be left trapped within the standardization of time and the objective measurement of value. Sara Ongaro has analyzed these ongoing transformations over the course of thirty years in terms of a process of integrating reproductive activities into production, a process that she defines as “productive reproduction” (145-53). In other words, the sphere of reproductive activities is integrated into that of production, so these activities no longer function to reproduce labor-power but instead are activities that directly produce surplus-value. In the fusion/confusion between production and reproduction, political economy’s categories of “production” and “reproduction” go into crisis. What is reproductive activity? It is the set of activities that create life, the cognitive, cultural and affective universe, a set of activities that runs from biological generation to domestic labor and activities of social, emotional, communicational and relational reproduction. What is happening with these activities today? Biological generation is becoming a new market, a field of valorization in itself, through the sale of “organs without bodies” and the renting of the uterus. As for domestic labor, a new division of labor between women arises here. Women are externalizing this activity of low “social value.” We are thus witnessing the development of personal services, clusters of jobs that reproduce the life of others. Ultimately, the labor of reproduction as a set of activities that create life, the cognitive, cultural and affective universe, enters into production by modifying the nature of labor.

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From this perspective it should then be possible to speak in terms of a “becoming-woman of labor.”27 The becoming-woman of labor would concern the very nature of labor, its being as an activity that produces economic value, goods and services on the basis of extra-economic human qualities such as language, relational ability, and affectivity. Corresponding to this setting to work of feminine competences is a generalization of specifically feminine conditions to a growing fraction of the active male population: precariousness, instability and atypical contractual forms will no longer be exclusively the feminine condition, but will encompass all of human activity. By entering the labor market, women will have exported what had been their condition to the rest of the world. This is the sense in which one could agree to analyze the feminization of labor as a situation that extends “the mechanisms of subjection applied above all and historically to women,”28 a situation consisting of forms that are worth investigating and resistances, obstacles, and modes of flight that are worth grasping. This will involve grasping the relations of domination in the field of the production of knowledges, images and information not merely from the angle of exploitation, but also from that of subjection and oppression. In an article I co-wrote with Maurizio Lazzarato, we proposed to speak of the passage from the capital/labor relation to the capital/life relation, which we explained in the following terms: [W]e are confronted with a capitalist accumulation that is no longer founded on the exploitation of labor in the industrial sense of the term, but on the exploitation of knowledge, living entities, health, free time, culture, relational resources between individuals (communication, socialization, sex), the imaginary, personal development, habitat, etc. What is produced and sold is not merely material or immaterial goods, but forms of life, forms of communication, standards of socialization, education, perception, habitation, transportation, etc. The explosion of services is directly linked to this evolution, and it no longer exclusively involves industrial services, but also the mechanisms that organize and control “forms of life.” For capitalist accumulation, ethnic, religious and cultural differences are becoming commodities, as is the biological reproduction of life. Life and its differences are becoming factors of valorization for an increasingly nomadic capitalism. The globalization through which we are living is not only extensive (delocalization, etc.) but also intensive, and it involves cognitive, cultural, affective and communicative resources (the lives of individuals) as well as genetic territories and heritages (human, vegetable and animal), the resources of the lives of species and the planet itself (water, air, etc.). This “setting to work” of life by an increasingly globalized capital, made possible by neoliberal logic, generates insecurity—

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insecurity and risk for life in its globality, and no longer just for labor as in Fordism. From poverty to Mad Cow Disease, from exclusion to AIDS, from the problem of housing to “sexual identity,” the very foundations of life are being undermined. (178-79)

From this perspective, the demand for guaranteed income can be considered according to two logics: one that claims monetary recognition for that power of creating life which largely surpasses employment— countable and measurable labor time and the enterprise; and another that considers guaranteed income as a precondition for re-appropriating spaces in which to experiment with other forms of life and to reappropriate knowledges and land, spaces that offer “the power to reshape our common lives, the power to change reality” (Starhawk, 219). These two perspectives converge at a single point: the idea of depriving money of its power to command by significantly weakening the wage relation as a constraint or condition of access to income. Nevertheless, according to the first perspective, even though it is detached from employment, this income is still presented as a form of wage—even if it is largely socialized—since it remains inscribed within a logic of monetary “recognition” of the productivity of life for and within capital. In other words, it responds in terms of social “justice” within capital and its logic of valorization by setting life to work, thus it posits a limit to capitalist exploitation but does not allow other becomings. But the setting of life to work does not consist solely of exploitation. Here the concept of the feminization of labor can be a tool if it is considered as an extension of mechanisms of subjection and oppression. Far from the rationality of economic calculation, but also far from Marx’s progressive vision of capital that is closely bound up with a certain positivist vision of science as the human domination of nature,29 the foundations of an income that would not be a wage can be sought in the feminist literature of the early twentieth century. At the end of the 1920s, Virginia Woolf, a friend of John Maynard Keynes and a member of the London bourgeois intelligentsia, published A Room of One’s Own. To the question, “What are the necessary conditions for the creation of works of art?” she answered, “it is necessary to have five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door if you are to write fiction or poetry…That is it. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom…That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own” (109, 112). From this perspective, revenue (or whatever other form of income is sufficiently beyond the categories of wage and profit) is presented as a “necessary condition” ex ante. Income ex ante imposes the need to rethink

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the creation of money ex nihilo, a “public” money that would not be capital since it would not be produced within an already capitalist relation of production. Far from claiming abstract universality, these “necessary conditions” can only be defined “locally.” Thus we must begin with an interrogation of practices and the “necessary conditions” that make them possible. The universality of socially guaranteed income is constructed as a politics of situated knowledges.

VI. The Becoming-Transfeminist of the Production of Knowledge: The Politics of Situated Knowledges We need to learn in our bodies, endowed with primate color and stereoscopic vision, how to attach the objective to our theoretical and political scanners in order to name where we are and are not, in dimensions of mental and physical space we hardly know how to name. So, not so perversely, objectivity turns out to be about particular and specific embodiment, and definitely not about the false vision promising transcendence of all limits and responsibility. — Donna Haraway (190)

Without wanting to claim a unity which, as Alice Walker writes, can lead only to madness, but also wanting to avoid schizophrenia, I have asked myself what it can mean for me to be an economist, well integrated into the university institution, after having confronted poststructuralist philosophy, feminist political theorizing, and post-colonial thought. Marxism, with all its variants, constituted a less and less stable and satisfactory frame of reference in which to situate my critical positioning.30 Using the marginal (but nevertheless privileged) strategic position of having access to a wage guaranteed by the state in return for 192 hours of teaching per year, I invested my time in Multitudes, a journal of non-academic political philosophy, a space in which I could escape the disciplinary enclosure that characterizes the French university, and then, since 2003, in an experiment in the co-production of knowledge within the movement of intermittent workers in entertainment [intermittents du spectacle]. The latter is a space in which I am experimenting with the figure of the “organic intellectual” in Aurora Levins Morales’s sense, a space for experimenting with a politics of situated knowledges.31 What is an intermittent worker in entertainment ? “Manufacturing the sensory,” an intermittent worker in entertainment is a wage laborer discontinuously employed by multiple employers at rates that vary according to the projects and the employers. Since the 1960s, these wage SubStance #112, Vol. 36, no. 1, 2007

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laborers who are “not like the others” have benefited from an “exceptional” regime of unemployment compensation, in the sense that the relative flexibility of the conditions of access to the right to unemployment compensation allowed a growing number of people to assure themselves of continuous income in a situation of radical discontinuity of employment. This “growing number” is conceived by power (that of the state, but also employers, as in the case of some workers’ unions) as “supernumerary,” a number that exceeds the “normal” equilibrium of the market between the supply and demand of cultural goods (but we should speak instead of the goods produced by the “entertainment industry” [industrie du spectaculaire]). This is a comforting vision for the producers of “economic truths.” The “supernumerary” has a cost: the deficit in unemployment insurance funding. The challenge to their specific regime of unemployment compensation already loomed as a real threat, but this is only the mark of the reform protocol, out of which a movement of great breadth has arisen. Its strength derives from its duration and from the fact that it has taken the organizational form of coordination, which is quite distinct from that of hierarchical organizational structures.32 Its strength also derives from the fact that it has taken into account the multiple subjectivities that compose it. Far from constituting a homogeneity from the viewpoint of labor skills, competences and practices, intermittent work [intermittence] covers a vast field, from machinists to composers, from directors to administrators, etc. Here we certainly find the characteristics of the immaterial worker of which Hardt and Negri speak, but the modes of existence, the life trajectories, labor practices, sensibilities and subjectivities implicated in the process of manufacturing “immaterial” goods are heterogeneous. Whatever it is that constitutes an “us” is not given; it is instead a problematic and passionate construction. More than just the imbrication of time of living and labor time, intermittent work can be conceived as a “borderland” between employment and unemployment, a site beyond employment and unemployment from which to interrogate the meaning as well as the contents of labor—a borderland as a space for experimenting with forms of life that feed on the hybridization of space-time inside/outside of employment.33 The supernumerary is thus the expression of flight from “normal” work, whose contents and meaning appear less and less obvious to us, toward the “borderlands,” since it is not only a matter of fleeing from wage-earning but also of engagement in the search for “meaning,” engagement in a becoming-other of the self and of what one makes of it. But the history of the movement of intermittent workers is

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also one of permanent “expertise,” which inspires a reflection on the politics of knowledge and poses the relationship between minoritarian and majoritarian knowledges as a problem.34 If I refer to this experience of the movement, it is because it somehow constitutes the site of a singular assemblage between the problematic of “minoritarian knowledges” or the politics of knowledge and the issue of the “continuity of income” in the discontinuity of employment, or rather, another way of thinking labor, activity and the multiple spaces of life. This assemblage passes by way of the very particular step that this movement took from the first days of its constitution. To try to sum up this step in a few words, I will draw upon two major titles of its initiatives: “We have read the protocol” and “We have a proposition to make to you.” The reform protocol is read collectively, as all the reports of the “experts” will later be, and the “employment practices” and “labor practices” are confronted with one another in order to determine the consequences of their application. The instituted truth-knowledge that makes up the law is confronted with the knowledges of those who have experience. By basing itself on the experiences and competencies of the greatest number, the reform protocol is criticized not only for the inequalities and exclusions it produces, but also for its inadequacy in dealing with the concrete and heterogeneous employment practices those concerned have experienced first-hand. To say the least, the result is disappointing: the reform does not bring about the hoped-for economies that have justified it. What is revealed is the political import of the economic reforms placed under the rubric “it must be done,” in order to bring about a refoundation of social policy. It no longer involves mechanisms of income transfer, but rather mechanisms of capitalization, according to a principle of individual insurance, intended to create the conditions for the existence of that economic and social regulator, the market. The old system of compensation, which limited the randomness inherent in discontinuous employment practices and assured a certain continuity of income each year, constituted a powerful tool by which flexibility could be reappropriated by intermittent workers as freely-chosen mobility; it constituted a tool of resistance to the processes of devalorization of labor and pauperization of workers, but it also freed them from the grip of employment and opened up other possibilities, other areas of the sensory and other temporalities. The experience of “expertise” within the movement of intermittent workers is very rich, and it allows the movement to shift the battleground to the very terrain of the production

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of power-knowledge, to what Foucault calls the “regime of truth.” Isabelle Stengers has emphasized the specific contribution of this movement: it is not merely a matter of laying claim to expertise; rather, it is the fact of having revealed the logic of the reforms imposed under the slogan “You are too numerous; it must be done.” The intermittent workers have revealed the bookkeeping logic on which neoliberal policies are based: fabricate deficits and use populations as adjustable variables. It appeared, then, that “the meaning of ‘it must be done’ […] refers not to a necessity that everyone must recognize, but rather to a global operation of reassembling the relations between the state and capitalism.”35 “We have a proposition to make to you” is the second moment, the second stage of “expertise”: it involves not only saying “no” to reform, since it is not just the conservative defense of the past, but also the occasion to elaborate a “New Model” of unemployment compensation for wage laborers in discontinuous employment on the basis of a collectively constructed representation of “necessary conditions” so that labor practices and other forms of life—extracted from the constraints of employment flexibility—will be possible. Far from claiming universality, the “New Model” is intended as an appropriable “open base,” adaptable to the “local” criteria belonging to different practices. The battle for social rights, for the assurance of income continuity, here takes on the meaning of a battle to protect and even enlarge this borderland between employment and unemployment that is intermittent work. The New Model brings about a displacement of the logic of employment/ unemployment. It foreshadows neither a total inside (permanent employment) nor a total outside (a universal dole). The New Model expresses neither the claim to permanent employment nor the claim to income, but rather guarantees the conditions for “making it,” for making something different, and making it differently. It displaces the centrality of labor, and a fortiori wage labor, without claiming to eliminate the class of wage-earners; it does so by destabilizing wage labor to the point that it can no longer be the “norm” imposed on everyone. The New Model articulates an income of activity and social income conceived within a logic of insurance that is neither individual nor assistance-based but rather mutualist. It utilizes the “inside” (cultural institutions and those of the market) and the “outside” (sites of experimentation outside the normalizing structures of aesthetics and cultural contents). In other words, this New Model is configured as a “necessary condition” for being able to “make it” and also to “make differently” the artistic creations that its own life extracts from employment time, from the caprices of the

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market and the rule of capital. It presents itself as a range of possibilities large enough that each person can choose her own forms of mobility and own practices of activity. Some researchers, myself included, have joined the movement. We did not bring with us the idea of collective expertise; it was already there, constitutive of the movement. And our presence in the movement certainly cannot be defined by the figure that Foucault called the universal intellectual, “a master of truth and justice…the spokesman of the universal” (1980, 126). There is something that makes us academics akin to the intermittent workers in the entertainment industry— something that has to do in part with the “borderlands” (between one contract and another for free-lance researchers, between teaching and research for those who are tenured, but even more, something that has to do with the borderlands between disciplines, between the narrow walls of the universities and their outside). But above all it is the fact that the production of knowledge, with which intermittent workers are experimenting, involve us directly as makers of “knowledges,” as university professionals (especially in the social sciences), and as engaged intellectuals. In the experience of co-production our practices are transformed, our categories metamorphosed, our interpretive schemas altered. Furthermore, what brings us together is the fact of knowing that an income is no guarantee that we can “make it” and “make it differently,” knowing that we still need tools of production and distribution. What brings us together is also the fact that we are this figure of which Hardt and Negri speak, producers of knowledges, symbols, information, relations and culture—the fact that we can also be co-producers of the culture that we are contesting. And we are experimenting with the complex relationship between exploitation and subjection. But what constitutes our common trait is the fact that in France, the producers of knowledges, symbols and information are all damnably white-faced. On the basis of her experience as an ethnologist, Vinciane Despret writes the following: Are not our categories, our problems, our history, the things that make us describe others as those things describe us? It is not just a matter of breaking with some versions of the “us,” but with the very idea that we could, without constructing it, seek universality—a universality that is so much more suspect than history has taught us, that has regularly served to impose the point of view of the dominant groups […] In place of abstract universality given as an a priori condition, we must substitute what feminists have called a “concrete universality,” made up of a multiplicity of viewpoints. (194)

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The experience of co-production fits into this construction of local concrete universality. It implies the confrontation among multiple viewpoints, but also the mobilization of multiple and singular competences. It involves the invention of a tool for producing sharable knowledge. There is no diploma for such manufacturing, but in any case this operation is not transferable since it is constructed within a fold of local institutional and political history, and it must be conceived instead as an “open base.” Foucault spoke of a “specific intellectual” in opposition to the figure of the universal intellectual in order to account for “a new mode of the ‘connection between theory and practice’” (1980, 126). But in our experience, the new mode is also defined by the implied figures: what in Foucault’s terms we could call specific intellectuals, but also “those concerned [concernés].” Far from being an acquisition, the production of “transversal links of one knowledge to another knowledge” between “specific intellectuals” and “those concerned” as experts—in the sense of “those who have experience”—is an everyday challenge: to avoid the risk of reverting to the figure of the “acknowledged expert” or worse, the “universal intellectual,” as well as the risk of the romantic idealization of minorities or “those concerned.” The risk of falling into a sort of “romantic” approach to the “margins” as exteriority is always great. But “[t]he margins,” writes Rosi Braidotti, “are always within, inside a social space that is not smooth but multilinear, discontinuous and pitted everywhere.”36 There is always a risk of falling into a no less romantic, naturalizing/essentializing approach to “those concerned” that idealizes the knowledge they bear as “pure,” “naïve,” “bare,” or “independent,” as if those knowledges were not already traversed by representations and visions, as if seeing did not require learning to see, and indeed “learning to see with the help of others without claiming to see for them.” From the critical perspective of hegemonic knowledge and its pretense of objectivity, there is a great risk of falling either into absolute relativism or into a position that, by idealizing the knowledge of “those concerned,” ends up in an approach that imagines that only identity will produce science. The feminist epistemologists, scientists and philosophers have posed the objectivity and universality of knowledge as a problem, and they have also shown that there is no becoming-woman of intellectual labor but rather many becomings-feminist: it is not “as women” that scientists have produced other modes of production of knowledge and other knowledges, since it is not identity that produces science, but rather critical

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positioning, as Donna Haraway has shown. “[F]eminist objectivity means quite simply situated knowledges” (188), but the knowledges of “those concerned” are not immediately situated knowledges. “Situated knowledge,” as Beatriz Preciado remarks in rereading Haraway, “does not constitute a transgression coming from the margins of normality” (2005, 149). Haraway notes that “feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. In this way we might become answerable for what we learn how to see” (190). “I am arguing,” she adds, “for politics and epistemologies of location, positioning and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims” (195). “Situated knowledges act as practices of subaltern objectivity in the face of universal scientific authorities and cultural relativisms,” writes Beatriz Preciado (2005, 149). As Haraway notes, such objectivity is a practice that privileges contestation, deconstruction, passionate construction, networks of relations that cover the world and include the ability to partially translate knowledges between communities that are themselves very different and differentiated in terms of power. Hence it is impossible to recompose a “universal” subject, either out of a paradigmatic figure (the precarious worker or the cognitive worker, for example) or out of a figure that incarnates the tendency (Hardt and Negri’s immaterial worker), but this impossibility of totalizing the critique, as Preciado emphasizes, does not imply the impossibility of local alliance among multiplicities; on the contrary, a minor alliance only exists in the multiplicity of enunciation as a cross-section of differences […] It is a matter of inventing “relational politics,” strategies of political intersection that challenge the spaces at the “intersection of oppressions.” (2005, 153)

The politics of situated knowledges can then be conceived as the politics of knowledges that connect differences, that establish rhizomatic alliances in discontinuity and not in consensus—a politics made up of networks of differential positionings, to use Chela Sandoval’s terms.37 The question of how to make the concept of the multitude “operative in the field” can only find satisfactory answers by planting itself firmly in the analysis of the terrain on which the connections are in the process of being made— the possible connections that imply not homogeneity, but rather multiple assemblages—by “manufacturing intelligence of the heterogeneous as heterogeneous, in which each term is an opportunity for others to experiment a bit differently with their positions” (Pignarre and Stengers,

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152). We have experimented with such a politics in this local experience, which has allowed us to produce a knowledge that will only ever be partial, and its partiality will make it objective. We have not discovered a “truth,” but instead have revealed the rules according to which the knowledges that institute the law, in their partiality, can be set up as truth. The political dimension of this movement is measured less by what it has won or lost in the short term than by the displacements that it brings about, and the metamorphoses that the collective experience has produced in each of us. Paris, January 2006 Translated by Timothy S. Murphy Notes 1. This article is dedicated to the memory of my grandmothers Amelia and Gabriella, to my young son Tom, and to my friend François Matheron. I would particularly like to thank Thomas Berns for his attentive reading and his advice, as well as the editors of this issue who, by inviting me to contribute, have also given me the opportunity for a new reflection on my experiences and my journey. 2. In the chapter “Docile Bodies” in Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), Michel Foucault writes: “The first of the great operations of discipline is, therefore, the constitution of ‘tableaux vivants,’ which transform the confused, useless or dangerous multitudes into ordered multiplicities” (148). 3. For a critique of Deleuze’s “becoming-woman,” see in particular Beatriz Preciado, Manifeste Contra-Sexuel (Paris: Balland, 2000). 4. Wittig 1992 (56). (Translator’s note: the citation has been modified to conform to Corsani’s translation.) 5. For American readers, I think it is important to emphasize the fact that in France, nationalist universalism (also called the politics of the “cultural exception”) has hidden from view the richness of the movement of ideas imparted by post-feminist thought as well as post-colonial thought. If the history of ideas has always been nomadic, “nomad feminism” (to follow Rosi Braidotti’s terms) must also settle accounts with “the symbolic mothers who have colonized the heritage of a movement that belongs to all.” 6. Preciado, “Savoirs_Vampires@war.” In Multitudes 20 (2005). The term “transfeminism,” according to Preciado, “marks the displacement of the site of enunciation from a universal ‘female’ subject to a multiplicity of situated subjects. It involves a conceptual overturning of the debates concerning equality/difference, justice/recognition, and essentialism/constructivism in favor of debates concerning the transversal production of differences.” 7. See Hardt and Negri. 8. De Lauretis 1992 (50). (Translator’s note: See also Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall, New York: New Press, 1995, 231-40). 9. hooks, interview with Andrea Juno in Angry Women (San Francisco: RE/Search, 1991). 10. Anzaldua, “Movimientos de rebaldia y las culturas que traicionan.” In Borderlands/La Frontera (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987). (Translator’s note: During her lifetime Anzaldua refused to allow her Spanish writings to be translated into English, in order

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to reject the “universalizing” ambitions of the hegemonic language, and I have respected her wishes in this case as well.) 11. Preciado, “Multitudes queer,” in Multitudes 12 (2003), p. 21. 12. See Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du divers (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). 13. See Jean-Yves Mondon, “La parole du créole qui ne se dit pas ‘créole’ en créole.” In Multitudes 22 (2005). 14. Multitudes has already dedicated a dossier in issue 4 to the liberal reading of Foucault; the title of the dossier is “Foucault chez les patrons” [“The Bosses’ Foucault”]! 15. For a caustic analysis of the republic and the riots in the Parisian suburbs in autumn 2005, see Yann Moulier Boutang, La révolte des banlieues ou les habits nus de la république (Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2005). 16. “The loss of gender norms,” writes Judith Butler in Gender Trouble, “would have the effect of proliferating gender configurations, destabilizing substantive identity, and depriving the naturalizing narratives of compulsory heterosexuality of their central protagonists: ‘man’ and ‘woman’” (187). 17. (Translator’s note: Corsani is referring to the augmented second edition; the first edition of Tronti’s book appeared in 1966. The quotation is from the chapter “Lenin in Inghilterra.”) The French translation by Yann Moulier and G. Bezza, as well as a substantial amount of literature on related subjects, is available on the Multitudes website, [www.multitudes.samizdat.net]. 18. See in particular chapter II.1 of Multitude, “Dangerous Classes.” 19. “The interstice,” write Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers, “is defined neither against nor in relation to the bloc to which it nevertheless belongs. It creates its own dimensions through the concrete processes that confer upon it its consistency and its range, that on which it bears and that for which it matters” 20. Hartsock cited by de Lauretis in “Eccentric Subjects.” In: Feminist Studies 16 (1990). 21. Isabelle Stengers, “Le défi de la production de l’intelligence collective.” Interview by Andrée Bergeron. In: Multitudes 20 (2005). 22. See Christian Marazzi, L’ammortamento del corpo macchina in Multitudes 27 (2007), pp. 27-37. 23. See Robert Muchembled, Le roi et la sorcière (Paris: Desclée, 1993) 155. 24. See Maruani and Reynaud, Sociologie de l’emploi (Paris: La Découverte, 2001). 25. See Multitudes 12 (2003) 125-145, especially Anne Querrien’s “Femmes, Multitudes, Propriété.” 26. From a strictly economistic viewpoint, the nature of the split between guaranteed income and the universal benefits of liberal logic rests on the conditional or unconditional character of this income, and on its level. See in particular Carlo Vercellone, ed., Sommes-nous sortis du capitalisme industriel? (Paris: La Dispute, 2003). 27. Here I am referring to an unpublished text by Christian Marazzi, but traces of this notion are also to be found in his book La place des chaussettes: Le tournant linguistique en économie politique (Paris: Eclat, 2000). (Translator’s note: Corsani is referring to the French translation of Marazzi’s Il posto dei calzini, one chapter of which is translated in this issue.) 28. Judith Revel (ed.), Devenir-femme de la politique,12 (2003). 29. A vision against which multiple voices are being raised, voices that pose the ecological question not as a constraint imposed on development but as the need to rethink the very notions of progress and development passed down from the Enlightenment thinkers. 30. Moreover, while changing the terms and historicizing the categories, Marxism preserves a binary logic, and if there is no more homo oeconomicus, there is still homo laborans… 31. “When I call myself an organic intellectual, I mean that the ideas I carry with me were grown on soil I know […] How I think and what I think about grows from my identity

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as a jíbara shtetl intellectual and organizer.” Morales, “Certified Organic Intellectual.” In: Latina Feminist Group, Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001) 27-28. 32. Unlike other organizations born in the 1990s and after 2000 that do not have hierarchical structures, this form of coordination no longer has official spokespeople, since no one can be one. 33. In issue 17 of Multitudes we dedicated a dossier to “Intermittence dans tous ses états” [“Intermittent work in all its states”]. 34. A dossier in issue 20 of Multitudes was dedicated to the question of expertise. 35. Stengers, “Le défi de la production de l’intelligence collective.” Interview with Andrée Bergeron, in Multitudes 20 (2005). 36. Braidotti, “L’Europe peut-elle nous faire rêver?” Interview with Antonella Corsani, in Multitudes 14 (97). 37. See Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

Works Cited Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999. Bourcier, Marie-Hélène. “Trafic queer,” in Queer: Repenser les identités, Rue Descartes 40 (2003) 98. ——. “Wittig la politique.” In: Wittig, 2001, 39. Bourcier, Marie-Hélène and Suzette Robichon, eds. Parce que les lesbiennes ne sont pas des femmes. Paris: Editions Gaies et Lesbiennes, 2002. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. ——. Nuovi soggetti nomadi. Rome: Luca Sassella Editore, 2002. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Politics of Subversion. New York: Routledge, 1999. Cavarero, Adriana. Le filosofie femministe. Milan: Mondadori, 2002. Cohen, Esther. Con il diavolo in corpo. Verona: Ombre corte, 2005. Chowder, Diane Griffin. “De la pensée straight à la théorie queer: Implications pour un mouvement politique,” in Bourcier and Robichon, 16. Corsani, Antonella, and Maurizio Lazzarato, “Le revenu garanti comme processus constituant.” In Multitudes 10 (2002) 178-179. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Despret, Vinciane. Quand le loup habitera avec l’agneau. Paris: Les empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2002. Fraisse, Geneviève. Les femmes et leur histoire. Paris: Folio Histoire, 1998. Foucault, Michel. “Dialogue sur le pouvoir.” In: Dits et écrits II, 1976-1988. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. ——. “Truth and Power.” In: Power/Knowledge, trans. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon, 1980, 126. Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” In: Simians, Cyborgs and Women. New York: Routledge, 1991. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. ——. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Press, 2004.

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de Lauretis, Teresa. “Quand les lesbiennes n’étaient pas des femmes,” in Bourcier and Robichon, 35. ——. Soggetti eccentrici. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1999. Lazzarato, Maurizio. Les révolutions du capitalisme. Paris: Les empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2004. Napoleoni, Claudio. Dalla scienza all’utopia. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1992. Ongaro, Sara. “De la reproduction productive à la production reproductive.” In Multitudes 12 (2003) 145-153. Pignarre, Philippe, and Isabelle Stengers. La sorcellerie capitaliste: Pratiques de désenvoûtement. Paris: La Découverte, 2005. Preciado, Beatriz. “Il faut queerizer l’université.” In Queer: repenser les identités. Rue Descartes. 2003. ——. “Savoirs_Vampires@war.” In Multitudes 20 (2005). Puwar, Nirmal. “Figure del nostro tempo,” in Movimenti postcoloniali, DeriveApprodi 23 (2003). Rancière, Jacques. On the Shores of Politics. Trans. Liz Heron. New York: Verso, 1995. Smith, Barbara, ed. Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. New York: Kitchen Table, 1983. Spivak, Gayatri. “Il dominio è di ogni colore.” In: Movimenti postcoloniali, DeriveApprodi 23 (2003), 21. Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics. Boston: Beacon Press, 1982. Tronti, Mario. Operai e capitale. Turin: Einaudi, 1971. Turcotte, “Foreword: Changing the Point of View.” In: Wittig 1992 (x). Walker, Alice. “In the Closet of the Soul: A Letter to an African American Friend.” In: Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. Ed. Beverly GuySheftall. New York: The New Press, 1995. Wittig, Monique. La pensée straight. Paris: Balland, 2001. ——. The Straight Mind. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963. Zucca, Michela. Donne delinquenti. Naples: Edizioni Simone, 2004.

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Kateb Yacine and the Ruins of the Present Seth Graebner

Several years before his death, the Algerian writer Kateb Yacine (19291989) recalled the early phase of his career in Paris, saying that le jour où il y a eu des embuscades en Algérie, le jour où il y a eu des morts français en Algérie, où il y a eu le sang, à partir de là le public a commencé à s’intéresser à l’Algérie. Les éditeurs ont commencé à faire automatiquement la chasse aux Algériens. Dib et moi nous avons été publiés grâce à l’actualité, aux embuscades qu’il y a eu dans France-Soir tous les jours. [the day there were ambushes in Algeria, the day there were French casualties, the day there was blood, then the public began to be interested in Algeria. Editors began to hunt automatically for Algerians. Dib and I were published thanks to current events, the ambushes that were going on every day in the pages of France-Soir.] (Corpet, Dichy and Djaider 60)1

Kateb attributes his entry on the Paris scene, and the “arrival” of Algerian literature generally, to a violent intervention of history. In his thinking, this constituted a relation of cause and effect between political struggle and literary style, two of his life-long commitments; it also suggests a relationship between history and the means of its expression. Still, the relationship between Kateb’s work and the history surrounding it needs clarification. After all, the first significant cluster of Francophone Algerian authors studied in the academy today, called the “génération de ’52" (or ’54, if the speaker wishes to emphasize the start of the war) of Mohamed Dib, Mouloud Mammeri, and Mouloud Feraoun, seems to have emerged with the gradual attainment of literary proficiency in French, concurrent with the coalescence of a sense of potential autonomy and political cohesion, rather than with the suddenness of an ambush. Furthermore, these authors published their first work before the actual outbreak of the hostilities of which Kateb speaks in the interview cited.2 Did the advent of Algerian literature in French, and Kateb’s own publication, really depend on editors “hunting” Algerians, much as the Army was doing? This cause would seem better suited to explain the appearance, from 1954 on, of a variety of “témoignages” [eyewitness accounts] of the war itself, than to explain the publication of a complex and difficult novel © Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2007

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like Kateb’s Nedjma (1956).3 Though one cannot deny the relevance of Nedjma to the immediate context of wartime events, nothing Kateb said in the interview just cited precludes the novel from responding to other imperatives beyond the need to comment specifically on contemporary events, or generally on the independence struggle. Nedjma comments not so much on historical events themselves, but on the way they might be retold, both within and outside the disciplines of history and archaeology. Colonial historians had set great store by the ruins (notably those of Roman origin) that dotted the North African landscape. The 1950s, however, saw the beginning of a broad questioning not only of what had passed for historical fact during the colonial period, but also of the very modes of historiography applied to colonized peoples and monuments, whether standing or ruined. In the case of North Africa, this involved a reevaluation of one of the leading sources for the history of the region, the fourteenth-century historiographer Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406). In the mid-nineteenth century, French scholars had “discovered” and interpreted Ibn Khaldun as the cornerstone of their belief in the circularity of North African history and in its supposed unproductivity. One hundred years later, however, such beliefs were becoming controversial among historians; Kateb’s Nedjma contains historical discourses that participate in the debate over how to read Ibn Khaldun, as well as in the broader discussion of how to write a history of the Maghreb that would mesh with popular myth and collective memory, thereby allowing the colonized to become actors in it, in their own right. I will argue that Nedjma proposes a style, if not an actual methodology, for “reading” ruins, insisting not only on their relevance for understanding North Africa’s past, but also on their productivity in creating the conditions for a politically viable Algerian present. Before Nedjma, the centerpiece of his written work, and for many readers the founding text of North African Francophone literature, Kateb had published a very few extracts of what would later become the text of the novel or its “sequels,” Le Cercle des représailles [The Circle of Reprisals] (1959) and Le Polygone étoilé [The Starred Polygon] (1966).4 In May 1945, Kateb had been a boarder at the Collège de Sétif; his participation in the demonstrations there marked his entire career. Five days after the riots, police arrested and tortured him, imprisoning him for several months in a concentration camp for political prisoners; many of those arrested with him were summarily executed.5 His experience and its sequels figured highly in the 400 page manuscript he composed between 1948 and 1954; readers at the Editions du Seuil obliged him to cut half of it. The result was Nedjma; the rest of the material underwent further rearrangement

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before appearing ten years later in Le Polygone étoilé. Kateb spoke of his publications as parts of a single work in constant gestation, always subject to recasting in other genres (Kateb, L’Oeuvre en fragments 14). Yet after these three volumes, he published little else in French, preferring to devote himself to theater in a mix of French and Algerian Arabic, staged on both sides of the Mediterranean with considerable success until the Algerian authorities banned several of his plays.6 Nedjma thus remains the focal point of his published oeuvre, the work in which he rethought his country’s relationship to history, and the novel that reshaped its representation in fiction. Nedjma appeared at a time of considerable formal innovation in the French novel, and several critics have shown the similarity of Kateb’s techniques with those of Butor and Robbe-Grillet, all the while resisting his assimilation with the nouveau roman.7 The editors at Seuil nonetheless felt the need to notify readers of the difficulties the novel presents, in a short text that accompanied all editions of the novel for forty years: neither a “notice” nor a “préface,” but an “Avertissement,” a “warning” about the dangers of innovative Algerian writing. The text appeared unmodified in editions of the novel as late as the 1990s, and the critic Jean Déjeux has shown how the reviews of Nedjma repeated the phrases of the “Avertissement” with great fidelity (Déjeux, “Réception critique” 113). It has also become a common reference in the academic criticism of the novel: the American pioneer of the study of North African literature in French, Eric Sellin, commented on it as early as 1971, and many critics since then have noted its condescension toward the novel itself.8 The author of the “Avertissement,” Michel Chodkiewicz, future head of the Editions du Seuil and himself a Muslim, first insists upon the novel’s Algerian specificity: it contained something eternally Arab and Algerian, rather than anything contingent or historical. That specificity nonetheless lay in the relationship between time and narration: the “Avertissement” draws a distinction between “European” and “Arab” thought, saying that [l]e rythme et la construction du récit, s’ils doivent quelque chose à certaines expériences romanesques occidentales,—ce que nous ne contestons pas—résultent surtout d’une attitude purement arabe de l’homme face au temps. La pensée européenne se meut dans une durée linéaire; la pensée arabe évolue dans une durée circulaire ou [sic] chaque détour est un retour, confondant l’avenir et le passé dans l’éternité de l’instant. Cette confusion des temps, que les observateurs hâtifs imputent au goût de l’équivoque, et où il faut voir d’abord le signe d’un génie de la synthèse, correspond à un trait si constant du caractère, à une orientation si naturelle de la pensée que la grammaire arabe, elle-même, en est marquée.

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[The narrative’s rhythm and construction, if they indisputably owe something to certain Western experiments in fiction, result principally from a purely Arab notion of man in time. Western thought moves in linear duration, whereas Arab thought develops in circular duration, or [sic] each turn is a return, mingling future and past in the eternity of the moment. This confusion of tenses—which hasty observers ascribe to a love of ambiguity, but which one should see first as the sign of a genius for synthesis—corresponds to a feature of the Arab character so constant, and an orientation of Arab though so natural, that Arabic grammar itself is marked by it.]9

Seuil thus claimed to deliver a truly Arab product to Parisian intellectual consumers, in essentialized (if not exoticist) terms. The “warning” has trouble defining the Algerians’ relationship to time, partly because it does not admit the historicity of that relationship. This idea about Arabs and their relationship to time leads European readers to the conclusion that Arabs cannot conceive of history as Europeans do: They do not think like Us. This alone seems an odd comment, regarding an author who did not read Arabic. Before it can get any further, however, the text inadvertently undercuts its assertion of the “circularity” of Arab thought. As the critic John Erickson has pointed out, an obvious misprint undermines the text. The sentence in question reads, “la pensée arabe évolue dans une durée circulaire ou [sic] chaque détour est un retour” [Arab thought moves in a circular time-frame [in which/or] every detour is a return].10 If we read it as printed, taking account both what it means to say and what it actually says, the text proposes two alternatives, the second of which allows the possibility of an entrance into history quite different from the relative stasis implied in the first. If the phrase “every detour is a return” is not a subordinate clause but an alternative, it inadvertently suggests that the line of Kateb’s thought does not have to go around in a circle, but might proliferate with curves looping back in all directions, never necessarily confining itself to a single track, let alone a circular one. The Moroccan theorist Abdelkabir Khatibi has called Nedjma a “baroque” novel, justifying the remark by pointing out its anarchic profusion of images (Khatibi 106). Rereading the “Avertissement,” however, suggests that Nedjma’s baroque quality lies also in the curves, loops, and folds of its chronology. In considering exactly what a chronological fold might be, I turn to the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who sees the fold as the defining production of the Baroque, less a static feature of decoration than an active principle of signification: The Baroque refers not to an essence but rather to an operative function, to a trait. It endlessly produces folds. It does not invent things: there are all kinds of folds coming from the East, Greek,

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Roman, Romanesque, Gothic, Classical folds. . . . Yet the Baroque trait twists and turns its folds, pushing them to infinity, fold over fold, one upon the other. The Baroque fold unfurls all the way to infinity.11

The production of folds is also a production of meaning, as blank surfaces take on contours, and with luck become readable. In their unfurling, these folds have a temporal dimension: the trait reproduces itself over time in not-quite-identical ripples across the surface, analogs of an original now impossible to isolate with certainty. What, though, has all this to do with the Maghreb and its historiography? In giving examples, Deleuze observes what he calls an “Islamic Baroque” in the clothes of women photographed in colonial-era postcards from North Africa (Deleuze 38). Yet we need not assert that any such thing exists, in order to use the notion of the fold as a heuristic device for figuring the texture of history operative in Nedjma. In the Maghreb, the curves and waves that define the European Baroque seem to coincide more naturally with the arabesque than with any putative “Islamic” Baroque. In any event, they go far beyond the draperies in erotic or exotic images, toward an infini of historical ramifications. A consideration of historical patterns in the Maghreb must necessarily pass via the fourteenth-century historian Ibn Khaldun, whose Muqaddimah, the introduction to his Kitab al-‘Ibar (ca. 1382), a history of the Imazighen or Berber peoples, constitutes the first rational approach to the discipline of history, as well as one of the last works of innovative thought to come out of North Africa until the modern period.12 Since his “rediscovery” by colonial-era orientalists, many scholars have projected their contemporary concerns onto Ibn Khaldun, who has thus been construed as the prescient observer of a wide variety of traits ascribed to the Maghreb, from an alleged cultural atavism, to a supposed penchant for Marxism, to name only two. I have no wish to make Ibn Khaldun, in my turn, a precursor of the Deleuzian Baroque. Nonetheless, four reasons, besides his position as a theorist of history, make him important for reading Kateb. First, Kateb mentions him by name in his texts, and cites him at several important junctures. Second, his observation of the cyclic rise and fall of dynasties, properly understood, fits closely with Kateb’s notion of the branching curves of history’s plots. Third, many North Africans have seen in Ibn Khaldun’s work the basis for an alternative vision of the region that would oppose the Arabo-Islamic cultural politics espoused by its governments; Kateb’s later projects certainly included the development of the Amazigh and especially Kabyle cultural identity, in a pluralist Algerian society. Finally, the years 1948-1956, in which Kateb composed and edited Nedjma, saw a significant revival of interest

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in Ibn Khaldun, coincident with the political ferment in Algeria. We have no reason to attribute to Kateb any particular predilection for Ibn Khaldun: Kateb’s heroes of the past were the Amazigh mytho-historical characters of Jugurtha, the king who fought the Romans, La Kahena, the queen who fought the Arabs, and more recently, Abdelkader, the Emir who fought the French. In an interview in 1972, Kateb suggests that he had only recently read all of the translated Ibn Khaldun, so we have no reason to suppose that he would have known more than the extracts published in reviews in the early 1950s (Kateb, Parce que c’est une femme 41). My argument here addresses not an influence on or intent of the author, but rather the participation of the text in the elaboration of a historical discourse going on at the time of its publication. A complete sense of Nedjma’s impact requires an account of its participation in the renewal of interest in Ibn Khaldun contemporary with it. Ibn Khaldun had figured highly in the colonialist historiography: the historian Abdelmajid Hannoum lays out the connection between the translation of sections of the Kitab al-‘Ibar and the Muqaddimah by William de Slane, and the various purposes the text served in the hands of not only the apologists, but also the strategists of the effort to colonize North Africa (Hannoum 61–2). Slane’s translation of the ‘Ibar, which appeared in 1854, responded directly to the concerns of the Armée d’Afrique, and formed the basis for most subsequent scholarly investigations of medieval North Africa. In the view of the colonial historian E.-F. Gautier, such investigations had to answer two questions: why had North Africa never ruled itself, and why had none of its outside rulers managed to hold it permanently? Regardless of the false premise of the first question, Gautier’s Le Passé de l’Afrique du Nord: Les siècles obscurs (1935, reissued in 1952) made extensive use of Ibn Khaldun’s idea of cyclic dynastic patterns, in which dynasties arose in the desert, conquered the decadent city, but within four generations became decadent in their turn, and were replaced by another desert dynasty. 13 In Gautier’s thinking, Ibn Khaldun had accurately diagnosed the stasis of North Africa, condemned to spin its historical wheel in place without progressing or presenting truly new elements. History so imagined offered the non-European population no scope for significant action, nor any way forward other than in submission to French rule. Michel Chodkiewicz’s “Avertissement” to Nedjma merely repeated this idea, which had all the credibility of received wisdom. This point of view, however, was even then collapsing under vigorous attack by a new generation of historians, as progressive Algerians

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rediscovered Ibn Khaldun, whose text, long available (in French) only in relatively scarce editions, was becoming more easily available as time passed. In 1952, two law professors issued a compilation in French and Arabic of highlights of Ibn Khaldun’s text for the use of students at the Université d’Alger. With greater visibility, the Moroccan-born Marxist geographer Yves Lacoste published “Les Prolégomènes d’Ibn Khaldoun” in 1953 in Progrès, a Communist-inspired Algerian review that also contained literary criticism and political essays; it reappeared in more developed form in the French Marxist review La Pensée in 1956. Lacoste specifically refuted earlier uses of the Muqaddimah that tended to characterize the North African past as uniform and static. To him, Ibn Khaldun’s most famous concept, the motor of history he called `asabiya, “group feeling,” rightly appears as more than the simple clan sentiment to which some scholars have reduced it: the term designates instead any one of a number of social or ideological structures that hold societies together and motivate conquest. Lacoste makes it clear that although Ibn Khaldun certainly did not see historical progression as linear, neither did he view Maghrebi history as spinning in place in circular revolutions. He discerned the curve of the rise and ruin of dynasties reproducing its pattern everywhere, in several directions at once; on one ruined polity might arise several new constructions, and so on ad infinitum. Similarly, the view of history advanced in Nedjma breaks with the circularity imposed by the “Avertissement,” and escapes toward an infinite horizon, like the Baroque fold imagined by Deleuze: “this formal element [the fold] appears only with infinity, in what is incommensurable and in excess, when the variable curve supersedes the circle” (Deleuze 38). Nedjma suggests a Khaldunian conception of history by representing physical and textual space in the curves, crevices, and folds typical of Deleuze’s Baroque. The Baroque topography of the novel proves fertile ground for the generation of an oppositional stance in history. With close attention to specific physical details of two cities he knew intimately, Constantine and Bône, Kateb delivers a critique of Algerian historiography, and elaborates a mythology in which, through new visions of Algeria’s cityscapes, he lays groundwork for reconciling the country’s past with its present and future.14 Large portions of Nedjma take place in the urban landscapes of these two cities with completely different historical and physical trajectories. Constantine, where the author was born in 1929, constituted the stronghold of religious reform, the Salafiya movement appearing in Algeria just after World War I. It served as base for bourgeois Muslim

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challenges to French authority, expressed via the Association des Oulémas, led by the Sheikh Ben Badis, a native of the city. More importantly for Kateb, however, Constantine’s predecessor Cirta was the city of the Amazigh hero Jugurtha, leader of the insurgency against the Romans. The city seems ideally situated to represent resistance; it sits on a rocky promontory, cut off from the surrounding land on three sides by the 200-meter gorges of the Rhummel; on the fourth side, a valley and hill presented major obstacles to French urbanization until the late nineteenth century. Crowded onto its “Rock,” Constantine successfully fended off an initial attack that ended in disaster for the French in 1836; the next year, it surrendered (last among Algeria’s major cities) only after bombardment and bloody house-to-house fighting. After the defeat, French authorities proved very reluctant to undertake the massive destruction and reconfiguration they had implemented everywhere else; they limited themselves to widening a few streets and creating an esplanade on the spot where their artillery had pierced the fortifications, recalling with its name the open wound in the city’s defenses: the Place de la Brèche. In addition, the colonial authorities decreed severe restrictions on real estate transactions in the city, wishing to keep Europeans out, and Arabs and Jews in. They succeeded to a considerable extent; old Constantine kept its “exotic,” “traditional” look until Kateb’s day, when urban deterioration, lack of capital, and indifference of the authorities began to cause visible degradation in the pre-colonial maze of narrow and twisted streets (Payand). Kateb jokes that by the 1940s, the radical municipal government (which a pied-noir historian credits with historic preservation) refused to collect the garbage, “à titre de tradition populaire” [supposedly by popular tradition] (Nedjma 145/204; Biesse-Eichelbrenner 42).15 While Constantine was the city the French were never able to remake, Bône was the one they liked to think they had built almost from the ground up. The Casbah was quite small, and the interest of the city for the French lay more in its port and the surrounding plain, propitious for colonization. Occupation of the plain and urban construction accelerated rapidly after 1848, when the city became the port of arrival for both deportee and volunteer colons following the revolution. By the 1920s, an enterprising city government had built a thoroughly modern city whose residents compared its chic promenade, the Cours Bertagna, to the Champs Elysées, though comparison to the Cours Mirabeau in Aix-enProvence might have involved less hyperbole. Industry and export funded this construction: Bône was depot and refinery to the Algerian mining industry, and its “minarets d’acier” [minarets of steel] would

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become emblematic for Kateb (Nedjma 64/92). As in several other Algerian cities, Europeans (here Italians and Maltese) formed the majority of Bône’s population. This demography was steadily changing everywhere, however; 1956, the year of Nedjma, saw for the first time Muslims outnumbering Europeans in Algiers, and the balance had by then tilted in Bône as well. The effect of demographic change could be seen most clearly in the suburbs rather than in the old city centers. For the first time, most urban Arabs and Imazighen lived not in central medinas (still heavily overpopulated nonetheless), but in outlying bidonvilles.16 Algerian urbanism from the 1940s on was largely an unsuccessful effort to curb the expansion of the slums, a task eventually made impossible by the influx of rural Algerians displaced by the war of independence. Constantine and Bône thus summarized, in Kateb’s day, the past, present, and foreseeable future of the Algerian city. They also provide intricate surfaces for the propagation of the expanding folds and waves of a Khaldunian notion of history, one that shows that no regime was as stable as it believed, but that each carried the seeds of its demise in a further wave of attack by a new people with a more powerful `asabiya. Kateb’s was the first novel by an Algerian of any ethnicity to adopt the “exploded text,” chronological disturbances, and structural complications of twentieth-century experimental writing.17 Nedjma’s structure, however, does more than bring the text into line with the preoccupations of literary critics of the past 40 years: it also contains the novel’s connection between history, myth, and the physical spaces of urban topography. Though the principal events take place between about 1929 and 1954, the narration begins with a scene from 1947 and proceeds forward rapidly in a series of discontinuous jumps to the latest events, those circa 1954, before looping back to oscillate forward and back over May 1945. Individual sections narrate much earlier events: the beginnings of colonialism, or the fate of the Amazigh kingdoms of ancient North Africa. Many of Kateb’s interpreters have commented on the structure, while others have discounted it as the random product of an attempt at order mandated by his editors.18 Regardless of Kateb’s intentions, the structural effects are present and interpretable. When his editors asked him to provide some order to a confused narration, Kateb divided the text into a system of chapters and sections: six chapters, each with one or two sets of twelve sections, ranging in length from a single sentence to nearly ten pages. Three of the chapters (III, IV, and VI) contain double sets of sections, each numbered one to twelve; the novel thus presents a carefully numbered nine-by-twelve grid of 108 sections altogether. In imposing this grid on a narrative that reads as if razed and

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rebuilt, Kateb seems at first to have employed, at the insistence of his editors, the same method as the French Army engineers imposing order on the tangled Casbahs of Algiers and Bône. Further scrutiny, however, calls into question this characterization of Kateb’s enterprise. Despite the apparently rigid precision of the numbers, the grid they form actually weighs very lightly on the baroque curves and folds of the narration; at times it is virtually invisible, not least because the size of the units varies so much. Furthermore, the grid produces a considerably more subtle effect than simply imposing order and providing landmarks. The structure uses two striking chiasms in the section numbering to formalize connections between key events in history and the plot, on the one hand, and essential descriptions of Constantine and Bône, on the other. The most important event for the novel’s mythic content, Nedjma’s sequestration in Nadhor by her ancestor Keblout’s clan, is narrated in sections IVa: 5-6, leading into the structural midpoint of the text. Sections IVa: 8-9, leading out of that center, narrate Rachid’s arrival in and description of Constantine, positioned as the mirror image of the sequestration scene. The other major piece of urban description, Lakhdar’s arrival in Bône in II: 10 (22 sections from the beginning of the novel) falls into a second chiasm, pairing it with the most important historical event of the plot, the riots in Sétif, in VIa: 2 (22 sections before the end). The ancient city and the myth of the decimated Kebloutis form the central chiasm; the modern city and the irruption of history into the plot form another, around it. From the point of view of Nedjma herself, her adolescence and freedom in Bône is paired with the impossibility of political liberties for Algerians; her confinement in Nadhor, with the potential for resistance among the ruins in Constantine. Constantine and Bône, however, cannot be so easily categorized. The conservative Constantine is also the site of one of the most erotically charged encounters with Nedjma’s liberated sexuality; the modern Bône is also the site in which the characters wander, disoriented, after the events of May 1945. Lakhdar’s arrival in Bône occasions the first real grappling with the problems of history and space in the novel. He arrives by train, shortly after his liberation from prison, where police tortured him for his participation in the riots. A typically Katebian description reports his impressions from the moving train; the text stresses the historical disjunction between a politically active Algerian and the terne avenir de la ville décomposée en îles architecturales, en oubliettes de cristal, en minarets d’acier repliés au coeur des navires, en wagonnets chargés de phosphates et d’engrais, en vitrines royales reflétant les costumes irréalisables de quelque siècle futur, en squares

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sévères dont semblent absents les hommes, les faiseurs de route et de trains, entrevus de très loin dans la tranquille rapidité du convoi, derrières les moteurs maîtres de la route augmentant leur vitesse d’un poids humain sinistrement abdiqué, à la merci d’une rencontre machinale avec la mort, flèches ronflantes se succédant au flanc du convoi, suggérant l’une après l’autre un horaire de plus en plus serré, rapprochant pour le voyageur du rail l’heure de la ville exigeante et nue qui laisse tout mouvement se briser en elle comme à ses pieds s’amadoue la mer, complique ses noeuds de voies jusqu’au débarcadère, où aboutit parallèlement toute la convergence des rails. [somber future of the city decomposing in architectural islands, in oubliettes of crystal, minarets of steel screwed into the heart of ships, in trucks loaded with phosphates and fertilizer, in regal shop windows reflecting the unrealizable costumes of some century to come, in severe squares where human beings, makers of roads and trains, seem to be missing, glimpsed in the distance from the train’s calm speed, glimpsed too behind the wheels of cars, masters of the road, adding to their speed the human weight ominously abdicated, at the mercy of a mechanical encounter with death, humming arrows following each other alongside the train, suggesting in series an ever-tighter schedule, bringing closer to the passenger the moment of the naked, demanding city which lets every movement break up within it as the sea fawns at its feet, tightens its knots of rails as far as the platform where all tracks . . . converge and end.] (Nedjma 64/92– 3, translation modified)

Bône is the terminus of the network, where the curves and knots of track converge and end: hardly encouraging for a character like Lakhdar, already disoriented by his near miss in a concentration camp terminus. The city imposes a terminal itinerary on its inhabitants, in addition to a timetable leading to a mechanized and dehumanizing existence. Its empty squares and industrial landscape suggest human absence, abdication, and abandonment. A character like Lakhdar, who had consciously tried to break step with the colonial order, has no chance here: Bône, the city of colonial modernity, offers no future to such a person. Its glittering architecture is broken up into incoherent blocks, offering only “oubliettes” to those coming out of historical trauma. The future is somber, and the goods displayed for sale are impossible fantasies. In any case, they were not displayed for the likes of Lakhdar. The impatience of the colonized with the unrealizable promises of commercial display may lead quickly to an “ever tighter schedule”; the colonial city’s time is running out. Lakhdar nonetheless takes his time in Bône, where he has relatives: among them, Nedjma herself, an adopted cousin whom he has never met. Before reaching the Villa Nedjma, however, Lakhdar wanders in Bône for seven months unnarrated in the novel’s exploded chronology. He has literally lost his way after the riots:

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Plus d’un passant s’exaspère, croit buter sur la fixité de ces prunelles de veau évadé, et donne du coude au vagabond sans réaction, qui ne se rend vraisemblablement pas compte qu’il tourne en rond; il a de nouveau l’horloge de la gare à sa gauche, mais on le devine sollicité par la montée de la Place d’Armes, à la façon dont sa démarche dévie et s’alourdit, tandis que le fumet des brochettes retient sa respiration; il s’arrête devant la montée; son orientation se confirme en cette halte pensive, et il se remet en marche, avec un masque de patient fuyant sur un tranchant de lame quelque passé d’enchantement et de cruauté, savane de chloroforme poussant sur un jeune corps insensiblement attaqué. [More than one pedestrian turns back in a fury after colliding with the fixity of those calflike pupils, elbowing the unreacting wanderer who evidently doesn’t realize he’s walking in circles; again the station clock is on his left, but you can tell he is attracted by the slope of the Place d’Armes from the way his gait swerves and retards, while the smell of the roasting food makes him catch his breath; he stops in front of the slope; his direction is decided by this pensive halt, and he starts walking again, his face the mask of a patient fleeing down a scalpel from some past of witchcraft and cruelty, a prairie of chloroform growing upon a young body imperceptibly attacked.] (Nedjma 68/97–8)

This passage could serve as a commentary on the disorienting effect of grid urbanism on subjects used to less rectilinear cities. The text also makes it clear, however, that the confusion does not arise from the contrast between “traditional” and “modern” organizations of space or apprehensions of time, or from Lakhdar’s incapacity to read the terrain. Lakhdar in fact shows a Surrealist sensitivity to urban detail. The critic Hédi Abdel-Jaouad has analyzed the parallel between Nedjma and Nadja; details like the smell of brochettes grilling and the walker’s constantly deviating itinerary suggest Breton and Aragon’s mode of promenade, the urban walk as an unconscious quest for palpable traces of history (Abdel-Jaouad 21). Surrealist metaphor ends the passage, with the “patient fleeing down a scalpel” and the “prairie of chloroform,” with which the city anesthetizes the walker, disorienting him as he flees from past cruelty in an urban wilderness. While pre-colonial history remains present only en filigrane, the passage invokes colonial confrontation in two details: the Place d’Armes and the train station clock, artifacts of two different moments of French construction in Algeria. The Place d’Armes represents the style of intervention that later French colonial urbanists would disavow: the razing of a large number of houses in the very center of the old city to make a rectilinear plaza, of dimensions calculated for reviewing troops. Algiers had one as well, constructed in the phase of initial occupation in the mid-1830s, but quickly renamed “Place Royale” and later “Place du

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Gouvernement.” Bône’s version of this military focal point kept its name, and thereby the memory of conquest, but this did not stop the colonized from putting it to their own uses. In Kateb’s description, brochette vendors have re-occupied the site conceived for the French army, using the tactics of reterritorialization that enabled the colonized subjects to take back portions of the rebuilt city, even those with names that seemed to exclude them most blatantly. A later phase of urban intervention produced the Bône train station: the French President Gaston Doumergue laid its cornerstone on his centennial visit in 1930.19 The “sacerdotal eye” of its clock has fascinated Nedjma’s critics, who have generally seen in it the representation of the European conception of time, dominating the colonized and imposing an unchallengeable substitution for mythic or circular time (Bonn, Problématiques spatiales 22–3; 51). Even if architecture once again figures the basic terms of colonial confrontation, however, it complicates them immediately: the station clock in Bône sits not in a simple tower or architrave, but on an art-deco imitation of a minaret. The focus of Lakhdar’s wanderings between the chic Cours Bertagna and the port is not an unmediated symbol of European chronological oppression, but a hybrid product of colonial history.20 This kind of neoMoorish design that added “Islamic” details to virtually any public building was not a product of mainland France alone, but of the interactions between Algerians and French that made up colonial history and culture. Kateb shows Lakhdar prey to a disorientation more historical than chronological: at stake here is not “un Arabe face au temps,” as the “Avertissement” would have it, but “an Algerian in history,” as expressed in the landmarks of Bône. Lakhdar takes some time to discover how to move in the space dominated by such landmarks, brutally reordered by the events of May 1945. Kateb, like the subjects of colonialism, reterritorializes the language of spatial fiction and the day-to-day uses of space in the colonial order. In doing so, he challenges the history concretized in the urban landscape. In the meantime, other characters in Nedjma arrive in Bône and Constantine, where they face analogous problems. Rachid’s arrival in Constantine uses a very different urban landscape to get at similar issues of colonial history. He does not have Lakhdar’s problem on arrival: having spent most of his life in Constantine, he already knows his way. His difficulty lies less in finding his way spatially than in situating himself historically in the maze of references visible in the city and its ruins. These ruins are familiar to him from the landscape of his memory, which occasionally overlaps the topography of the city’s history. The street in

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which he was born and spent his childhood contains traces of the French artillery assault of 1837, covered with a garden gone wild, but still apparent to those who know to look. Rachid’s own house, which “faisait frontière entre le ghetto et la ville ancienne” [made a frontier between the ghetto and the old city] evokes the city’s conquest, maison par maison par le sommet du Koudia (aujourd’hui la prison civile où les vaincus purgent leur peine sous d’autres formes pour un forfait bien plus ancien que celui dont on les dit coupables, de même que leur banc d’infamie repose en réalité sur un silence de poudrière abandonnée) qu’occupait la batterie de siège, pulvérisant les nids de résistance l’un après l’autre; puis, par la place de la Brèche à partir de laquelle allait être bâtie la ville moderne, enfin par la porte du marché, l’entrée de Lamoricière en personne, la hâche d’une main et le sabre de l’autre . . . ‘Pas loin de sept heures’, pensait Rachid . . . L’heure à laquelle se montra le chef des Français, dans les décombres qu’un siècle n’a pas suffi à déblayer. [house by house, to the height of the Koudia (today the civil prison where the conquered work off their sentences in other forms, for a crime much older than the one they were said to be guilty of, just as their bench of infamy actually rests on the silence of an abandoned powder magazine) which the besieging battery occupied, pulverizing the resistance nests one after the other; then, through the Place de la Brèche, where the modern city was to be built, and finally through the market gate, the entrance of Lamoricière himself, an axe in one hand, a saber in the other . . . ‘Near seven,’ Rachid thought . . . The hour when the French leader appeared in the ruins a century hasn’t been enough to clear away.] (Nedjma 145–6/204–5)

Everything in Constantine dates back further than it first appears. The rubble still visible in odd corners is not only that of recent urban decay, but also of Damrémont’s cannonade; the alleged crimes of prisoners in the city jail go back a century at least; the prison itself is literally a historical powder-house. The city still preserves the memory, down to the hour, of the French takeover now figured in its urban fabric by the “Place de la Brèche” built where days of bombardment breached the city wall. This pattern of conquest, partial destruction, and stagnation seems to have an equivalent in the narration of Rachid’s fate: he is apparently hostage to history. He had participated in political agitation (with a movement inspired by Ben Badis in the madrasa, the Islamic school he attended); however, he abandoned politics well before 1945.21 On his return to the city, he wanders its twisting streets for a while among these landmarks, but gradually confines himself to a fondouk, a traditional hotel (in this case inhabited by hashish smokers). At the end of the novel’s chronology, he remains immobilized there, telling his stories of Nedjma’s sequestration and his friends’ misfortunes. Kateb includes a note to explain that Constantine was known as qusantina ad-dahma, “Constantine the Crushing” (Nedjma 142). The novel seems at first to SubStance #112, Vol. 36, no. 1, 2007

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have sacrificed Rachid, crushed by the stagnated and oppressing history of Constantine. The positioning of the narrative eye, however, suggests less of a retreat from history than Rachid’s progressive shutting-in would lead readers to expect. The balcony of Rachid’s fondouk provides a fine aerial perspective over the gorges and countryside surrounding Constantine; this wide-open space serves as the locus of narration of Rachid’s stories. The site over which he has such a good view is itself historically invested in ways that ultimately prove liberating: Elevée graduellement vers le promontoire abrupt qui surplombe la contrée des Hauts Plateaux couverts de forêts, au sol et au sous-sol en émoi depuis les prospections romaines et les convois de blé acheminés par les Gênois pour finir impayés dans les silos du Directoire, Constantine était implantée dans son site monumental [. . .] à chaque détour, chaque escapade, chaque maléfice de la brusque, la persistante ville—Ecrasante de près comme de loin—Constantine aux camouflages tenaces, tantôt crevasse de fleuve en pénitence, tantôt gratte-ciel solitaire au casque noir soulevé vers l’abîme: rocher surpris par l’invasion de fer, d’asphalte, de béton, de spectres aux liens tendus jusqu’aux cimes du silence, encerclé entre les quatre ponts et les deux gares, sillonné par l’énorme ascenseur entre le gouffre et la piscine, assailli à la lisière de la forêt, battu en brèche [. . .] où la terre tremble et se présente le conquérant et s’éternise la résistance: Lamoricière succédant aux Turcs après les dix ans de siège, et les représailles du 8 mai, dix ans après Benbadis et le Congrès Musulman, et Rachid enfin, dix ans après la révocation puis l’assassinat de son père. [Rising gently toward the steep promontory that overhangs the wooded region of the High Plateau, its earth in turmoil since the Roman prospectors and the Genoese wheat caravans that rotted, unpaid for, in the Directory silos, Constantine was planted on its monumental site [. . .] at each loop and curve, each escapade, each trick of the sudden persistent city—”crushing” close up as far away— Constantine with its stubborn camouflages, now the crevice of a hidden river, now a solitary skyscraper with its black helmet raised toward the abyss: a rock surprised by the invasion of iron, asphalt and concrete, specters linked to the peaks of silence, encircled by four bridges and two railroad stations, furrowed by the huge elevator between the gulf and the pool, assailed at the forest’s edge, forced open [. . .] where the ground shudders and the conqueror appears and the resistance endures: Lamoricière succeeding the Turks after ten years’ siege, and the reprisals of May 8, ten years after Benbadis and the Moslem Congress, and Rachid finally, ten years after his father’s recall and murder.] (Nedjma 143–4/200, 202, translation modified)

The city’s site contains references to a history of colonization far longer than the 110 years of French presence: Romans and Turks left their traces, and the ground itself records the origin of the dispute over a debt that eventually provided a pretext for the French invasion in 1830: the wheat

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for which the Directory had not paid. The history thus evoked is a violent one, a series of defeats culminating in the murder of Rachid’s father, probably by Si Mokhtar, Rachid’s mentor. These events do not amount to a glorious or monumental past, or even to a coherent one: the city is subject to tremors and convulsions, and always on the verge of decadence. Nonetheless, Constantine in the novel continues to survive; though the conquerors break through the walls, the resistors dig in their heels. In its curious topography, Constantine provides the beginnings of spatial and historical reinterpretation. The viewer cannot easily grasp the city from any single perspective; its “loops and curves,” “escapades,” and “stubborn camouflage” mark its resistance to both penetration and allencompassing views. Moreover, its striking orography suggests a Baroque motif, a surface folded onto itself. The elevator down the side of one of the cliffs appears to move in a furrow rather than in a tower; the tallest buildings raise their roofs toward the gorge, rather than the sky. If the layout and facades of a city register the movements of its history on horizontal and vertical screens, here those surfaces appear bent or folded: the text inverts horizontal and vertical, and the screens become baroque films of ripples and folds, on which an inscribed line almost automatically becomes a series of curves and detours. The city thus resists the projection of a linear history, and invites the sort of reading to which the “Avertissement” unwittingly alludes, an interpretation of history in which “each turn is a return.” These “returns” do not lead back to an endlessly reiterated beginning, as in the colonial misreading of Ibn Khaldun’s cycles; they form instead a devious and circuitous progression. This progression wends its way among the descriptions of ruins that cover the novel’s landscape in layers. Ruins constitute a major feature of the novel’s two cities, and form the connection between them; they are also Kateb’s raw material for extrapolating myth from history. Rachid describes his native city in an extended poetic musing, focusing on the role of ruins in the urban scene: La Providence avait voulu que les deux villes de ma passion aient leurs ruines près d’elles, dans le même crépuscule d’été, à si peu de distance de Carthage; nulle part n’existent deux villes pareilles, soeurs de splendeur et de désolation qui virent saccager Carthage et ma Salammbô disparaître, entre Constantine, la nuit de juin, le collier de jasmin noirci sous ma chemise, et Bône où je perdis le sommeil. [Providence had willed it that the two cities of my passion should have their ruins nearby, in the same summer twilight, so near Carthage; nowhere are there two such cities, sisters in splendor and desolation, that saw Carthage sacked and my Salammbô disappear, between Constantine, the June night, the collar of jasmine blackened under my shirt, and Bône where I lost my sleep.] (Nedjma 172/243–4, translation modified)

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Rachid’s Salammbô is of course Nedjma, the object of the pursuit of all four protagonists. Salammbô’s replacement enables Kateb to reinvest Flaubert’s classicized Carthage with Amazigh signifiers. For him, Carthage is a corner of the triangle it forms with the ancient Amazigh cities of Hippone (Bône) and Cirta (Constantine), which outlasted it. These cities have their ruins nearby, keeping the past close to hand. Uncovering the archaeological vestiges of a glorious past is a common move in Algerian historiography, and proved very powerful in the hands of colonial historians, who started from the premise of a just French presence. Reading Kateb and Ibn Khaldun together, however, suggests some other possibilities for interpreting ruins. These two strongholds of the Numidian kingdom that united much of North Africa before the Roman colonization are far from intact, and their ruins do not engender an unproblematic model for Algerian history. The fact of their neardestruction, more than their existence itself, gives them their evocative power. Rachid specifically contrasts the Amazigh ruins of Cirta with the better preserved Roman ruins of Lambèse, the ancient colonia on which Napoléon III built a penitentiary for political prisoners. Speaking of his native Constantine, he insists Pas les restes des Romains. Pas ce genre de ruine où l’âme des multitudes n’a eu que le temps de se morfondre, en gravant leur adieu dans le roc, mais les ruines en filigrane de tous les temps, celles que baigne le sang dans nos veines, celles que nous portons en secret sans jamais trouver le lieu ni l’instant qui conviendrait pour les voir: les inestimables décombres du présent . . . J’ai habité tour à tour les deux sites, le rocher puis la plaine où Cirta et Hippone connurent la grossesse puis le déclin dont les cités et les femmes portent le deuil sempiternel, en leur cruelle longévité de villesmères; les architectes n’y ont rien à faire, et les vagabonds n’ont pas le courage d’y chercher refuge plus d’une nuit; ainsi la gloire et la déchéance auront fondé l’éternité des ruines sur les bonds des villes nouvelles. [Not the remains of the Romans. Not that kind of ruins, where the soul of the multitudes has only time to waste away, engraving their farewell in the rock, but the watermarked ruins of all times, the ruins steeped in the blood of our veins, the ruins we carry in secret, without ever finding the place or the time suitable for seeing them: the inestimable ruins of the present . . . I have lived in both places, the rock, then the plain where Cirta and Hippone knew greatness and afterwards the decline for which the citadels and the women wear their sempiternal mourning, in their cruel longevity of mother-cities; the architects have nothing to do there, and the vagabonds have not the courage to seek refuge longer than a single night; thus glory and defeat have founded the eternity of ruins upon the growth of new cities.] (Nedjma 164–5/232–3, translation modified)

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present and future constructions (physical or political) to dust. For him, ruins are not part of the past, but of the present; rather than leaving stable traces (“engraving their farewell in the rock”) they appear “en filigrane de tous les temps,” watermarked into the surface of paper or cloth, a surface subject to rippling, folding, or distortion. These “ruins of the present” are paradoxically constructed on top of cities that otherwise appeared new. To the practiced eye, they form a baroque overlay rather than a classical base for new construction; Kateb imagines that Algerian history has somehow folded back over itself to place the ruins on top of the new. In addition to their ambiguous placement, ruins offer at best an unclear symbolism; they may prove virtually unreadable. At several points, neither protagonists nor narrator seem to know how to name them, uncertain if they are looking at the ruins of Cirta, or of some city with an older name (Nedjma 173/246). Cirta and Hippone may not actually have represented the earliest origins of North African civilization, and prevalence and ambiguity of ruins suggests the impossibility of finding such a place. Rachid feels, furthermore, that the two cities pull him in opposite directions, just as their modern replacements leave him torn between closure and coherence on the one hand, and openness and modernity on the other. Nedjma herself appears trapped between the two cities after her sequestration, endlessly travelling the road from one to the other in a closed carriage, unable to arrive in either one. Even Kateb’s rejection of the myth of Arab and Islamic unity (problematic in Algeria) does not lead to a less conflicted construction of the past. Certainly the ruins are “Numidian” and therefore Amazigh rather than Arab, but the Amazigh-identified past remains just as difficult to build upon as the glorified Arab conquest. Even as he connects the ruined cities to a “mother-city,” to Salammbô, or to Nedjma herself, Kateb suggests that while a new nation might find it natural or necessary to build on these symbols, there are dangers inherent in basing a new national identity on such slippery signifiers. Nedjma’s sequestration in the clan stronghold of Nadhor shows the danger, for women, in basing Algerian national identity on an overdetermined symbol of femininity (Woodhull 46, 48). The same danger may lie in imagery that confines the female inhabitants of these “mother-cities” to “sempiternal mourning.” The pitfalls of the city as symbol are of two sorts: first, the apparent ease with which a city’s structure may be violated, and second, the rapidity with which it may become unresponsive and sclerotic, literally clogged with ruins. First, identifying the city as female can lead too

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easily to perceiving the colonial “penetration” as the rape of an urban structure. This seems especially true in Bône, where the city was so heavy-handedly rebuilt with money derived from resource extraction: Nedjma’s protagonists see the city physically mauled by the European industrial complex, and their country’s riches visibly flowing out of its port. The novel, however, does not present colonized cities or subjects passively taking abuse; Kateb knows from looking closely at the city’s structure that it results from an active, if unequal, exchange between colonized and colonizer. The violation model by itself is too simple to account for the presence of ruins in Algeria’s colonial past, or the construction of the monuments of its present. The second difficulty, that of urban sclerosis or stagnation, becomes yet more serious. In Rachid’s city, “les architectes n’ont rien a y faire” [the architects have nothing to do there], since he is very suspicious of grand projects and their symbolism: Les grands chantiers qu’on se proposait de mettre en marche avaient toujours passionné les habitants comme un rêve exotique, digne de l’ère nucléaire, et que la plupart attendaient pour fonder un foyer ou acheter une chemise . . . quelques immeubles gigantesques, quelques usines anarchiques, et le chômage persistant dans le plus riche des trois départements, dans la ville même “où de Gaulle vint m’accorder la citoyenneté.” [The great work-sites that were supposed to be opened had always excited the inhabitants like an exotic dream, worthy of the nuclear age, and which most of them were waiting for in order to start a family or buy a shirt . . . A few gigantic apartments, a few anarchic factories, and the persistent unemployment in the richest of the three departments, in the very city “where de Gaulle came to grant me citizenship.”] (Nedjma 146/205)

The hope of progress expressed in ruinous projects (on construction sites themselves soon indistinguishable from ruins) leads only to stasis, as the inhabitants constantly push back their own projects, and the novel pushes forward in its own circuitous motion. For their part, the four protagonists of Nedjma work on the site of a new project, totally incomprehensible, probably pointless, and frequently postponed: “Y en a qui sont morts sans être sûrs d’avoir vraiment travaillé . . . A supposer que le projet soit réel, qui sait si le marché couvert ne se transformera pas en commissariat de police?” [Some died without ever being sure they really worked on something . . . supposing the project is a real one, who knows if the market won’t be turned into a police station?] (Nedjma 43/62–3). The worker speaking here expresses a perfectly reasonable concern, given the police crackdown in May 1945; the Gouvernement Général’s banner projects of the late

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1940s and early 1950s were the cités of suburban Algiers, where architectdesigned market squares soon became heavily patrolled zones of confrontation.22 Again, in a scene in the last work of the Nedjma cycle, Le Polygone étoilé, situated ambiguously either during the war or after independence, Kateb describes a concentration camp of laborers working on a project that the authorities declare vital to national prestige. It is neither described nor completed; even if it were, the “note d’urbanisme” [whiff of urbanism] it would bring to the region would benefit only the foreign experts in charge and the retired military men who would monopolize it (Kateb, Le Polygone étoilé 10, 101). The narrator insists on the impossibility of couching a national identity in a design: “Chaque fois les plans sont bouleversés” [Every time the plans are upset] (Polygone étoilé 10). Grand building projects symbolizing Algerian identity or undertaken in the name of national pride lead to the strangulation of the living city actually inhabited by ordinary citizens. Such projects, furthermore, prove irrelevant for national identification when history and identity remain as shifting and polyvalent as Rachid’s “inestimable ruins of the present.” Despite these difficulties, ruins maintain a connection with the mythic elements of Nedjma, and an ideological over-investment in the mothercity may be a necessary danger in a novel where the fathers are decadent or absent. Ruins and ancestors derive their power for Kateb not from their symbolism as vestiges of past grandeur, but from the very fact of their destruction. All the major characters descend from such a ruined ancestor: the mythologized Keblout. He appears in two incarnations, seven hundred years apart: the clan’s ultimate ancestor, a Amazigh-ized member of the invading Beni Hillal tribe in the twelfth century, and the leader based in Nadhor at the time of the French invasion. Kateb explains that the second Keblout mysteriously disappeared and his sons died at the hands of the French, who coopted, dissipated, and divided the generation intervening between them and the fathers of the four protagonists. Only one of the four branches remains in Nadhor, in steady decline despite its resistance to penetration from outside. The other branches are represented by the dissolute fathers of the four protagonists and Nedjma; their decadence causes confusion of the paternal blood lines. Nedjma’s paternity is uncertain, and Si Mokhtar, her most likely father, fails to prevent her marriage to a man who may be his son (and therefore, at two removes of uncertainty, her half-brother). Si Mokhtar himself exemplifies the ruined and yet mythically powerful progenitors. An unbeliever and fast liver, he nonetheless claims genuine authority on

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Islam, and heads the Algerian delegation of pilgrims to Mecca; thoroughly imbued with the culture of spa towns and the Riviera, he nonetheless also serves as the repository of the Keblout clan’s history.23 His power stems from his decadence, ruin, and resurgence; much like the city of Constantine, the mythic elements of his persona provide material for historical recovery. After Si Mokhtar’s generation of the diaspora dies out, the Nadhor Kebloutis are all that remain. Left with their collapsing mosque, their rituals of sacrifice, and their emblematic vultures (yet another symbol of collapse and decomposition), they represent the “ruins of the present” of the clan. With the biological fathers thus eliminated, the ruins of the clan and the myth of Constantine, the mother-city “battue en brèche” but surviving by ruse, engender a type of history based not on male-line inheritance, but on detours and dodges among the ruins. If they wish to build a city in which they can move in historically consequential ways, Kateb urges his fellow Algerians not to rely on the self-perpetuating political elite that inherited power from the “chefs historiques.” He suggests instead a positive interpretation of a phrase of Ibn Khaldun, cited from an unnamed secondary source: “Tout ce qui est arabe est voué à la ruine” [Everything Arab is headed for ruin], says the observer of the rise and fall of dynasties.24 For Kateb, the phrase holds as much promise as menace: Nedjma establishes the productivity of ruins, as well as their destabilizing influence. Ibn Khaldun knew that ruins were never an endpoint in North African history, and this question lay at the center of the debate regarding his work in the 1950s. The baroque folds and complexities of his account of the historical process allowed ruins to overlay living cities, as much as cities could be built on ruins. For him, and for Kateb, ruins are way-points through which new historical developments pass as they set out along their curving paths. As such, they are ideal grounds for reterritorialization. In Algeria, the reterritorialization of the colonized in the colonial city took place via a process of recreating or re-imagining ruins and overlaying them like a transparency on top of the French (re)constructions. Any historiography of the Maghreb must take into account this circuitous process. Kateb’s work, as it participates in contemporary debates over the construction of postcolonial history, implies learning to use such overlays to build a provisional historical account on shifting ground, as a means of finding one’s way among the ruins of the present. Washington University in Saint Louis

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Works Cited Abdel-Jaouad, Hédi. “Kateb Yacine’s Modernity: Rewriting Surrealism.” SubStance 69 (1992): 11–29. “Alger, ville-pilote de l’Afrique du Nord.” Alger-Revue May 1955. Aresu, Bernard. Counterhergemoic Discourse from the Maghreb: The Poetics of Kateb’s Fiction. Tubingen: Narr, 1993. Arnaud, Jacqueline. Recherches sur la littérature maghrébine de langue française: le cas de Kateb Yacine. Université de Paris III, 1978. —. “Les villes mythiques et le mythe de Nedjma dans le roman de Kateb Yacine.” Journée Kateb Yacine: Actes du colloque organisé par le Départment de Français, Université de Tunis I (5 mai 1984). Tunis: Faculté des Lettres de la Manouba, 1990. Aurbakken, Kristine. L’Étoile d’araignée: une lecture de Nedjma de Kateb Yacine. Paris: Publisud, 1986. Biesse-Eichelbrenner, Michèle. Constantine: la conquête et le temps des pionniers. [Honfleur, France: Marie], 1985. Bonn, Charles. Kateb Yacine: Nedjma. Paris: PUF, 1990. —. Problématiques spatiales du roman algérien. Algiers: ENAL, 1986. Cataldo, Hubert. Bône 1832–1962 et Hippone la Royale. Montpellier: Africa Nostra, 1986. Corpet, Olivier, Albert Dichy, and Mireille Djaider, eds. Kateb Yacine, éclats de mémoire. Paris: IMEC, 1994. Çelik, Zeynep. Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnnesota Press, 1993. Déjeux, Jean. Littérature maghrébine de langue française: Introduction générale et Auteurs. Sherbrooke: Naaman, 1978. —. “Réception critique de Nedjma en 1956–57.” Actualité de Kateb Yacine. Ed. Charles Bonn. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993. 109–26. Erickson, John D. “Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma: A Dialogue of Difference.” SubStance 69 (1992): 30–45. Fosdick, Charles and David Murphy, eds. Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction. London: Arnold, 2003. Gautier, Emile-Félix. Le Passé de l’Afrique du Nord: les siècles obscurs. Petite bibliothèque Payot. Paris: Payot, 1964. Gontard, Marc. Nedjma de Kateb Yacine: Essai sur la structure formelle du roman. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985. —. “A propos de la séquence du Nadhor.” Actualité de Kateb Yacine. Intro. Charles Bonn. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993. 133–44. Hannoum, Abdelmajid. “Translation and the Colonial Imaginary: Ibn Khaldun Orientalist.” History and Theory 42 (Feb 2003): 61–81. Ibn Khaldun. The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History. Trans. Franz Rosenthal. New York: Pantheon Books, Bollingen Series, 1958. Kateb, Yacine, Mohammed Dib, and Pierre Laffont. “Le Chômage, cette plaie.” Alger Républicain 8 May 1952. Kateb, Yacine. Boucherie de l’espérance. Ed. Zebeida Chergui. Paris: Seuil, 1999. —. L’Oeuvre en fragments. Ed. and intro. Jacqueline Arnaud. Paris: Sindbad, 1986. —. Nedjma. 1961. Trans. Richard Howard, Introd. by Bernard Aresu. Charlottesville, VA: Caraf Books, University of Virginia Press, 1991. —. 1956. Nedjma. Paris: Seuil, 1996. —. Parce que c’est une femme. Paris: Des femmes, 2004. —. Le Polygone étoilé. Paris: Seuil, 1966. —. Soliloques. Paris: La Découverte, 1991.

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Kelly, Debra. Autobiography and Independence: Selfhood and Creativity in North African Postcolonial Writing in French. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005. Khatibi, Abdelkabir. Le Roman maghrébin. Paris: François Maspero, 1968. Lacoste, Yves. “La Grande oeuvre d’Ibn Khaldoun.” La Pensée 69 (Oct 1956): 10–33. —. “Les Prolégomènes d’Ibn Khaldoun.” Progrès 1:2 (Apr.-May 1953): 28–39. Payand, Bernard. La Médina de Constantine: De la ville traditionnelle au centre de l’agglomération contemporaine. Poitiers: Centre interuniversitaire d’études méditerranéennes, 1989. Pease, Elizabeth Scali. “L’Espace, la mère, l’impasse: Nedjma de Kateb Yacine.” Francofonia: Studi e Ricerche sulle Letterature di Lingua Francese 14:26 (Spring 1994): 87– 101. Prochaska, David. Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bone, 1870–1920. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1990. Sellin, Eric. “The Algerian Novel of French Expression.” The International Fiction Review 1:1 (1974): 38–47. —. “Algerian Poetry: Poetic Values, Mohammed Dib and Kateb Yacine.” Journal of the New African Literature and the Arts 9–10 (1971): 44–67. Surdon, Georges and Léon Bercher, eds. Recueil de textes de Sociologie et de Droit public musulman contenus dans les “Prolégomènes” d’Ibn Khaldoûn. Bibliothèque de l’Institut d’Etudes Supérieures Islamique d’Alger. Algiers: Imprimerie officielle, 1951. Toumi, Alex Baylee. Maghreb divers: Langue française, langues parlées, littératures et représentations des Maghrébins, à partir d’Albert Memmi et de Kateb Yacine. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. “Le Voyage du Président de la République en Algérie.” L’Afrique du Nord illustrée 17 May 1930. Woodhull, Winifred. “Rereading Nedjma: Feminist Scholarship and North African Women.” SubStance 69 (1992): 49–63.

Notes 1.

Except where indicated, all translations in this article are my own. 2 Jean Déjeux attributes the phrase “génération de 1954,” which he says explains little, to the Algerian poet Henri Kréa (Déjeux, 26). 3 Henry Alleg’s banned account of surviving torture at the hands of the paratroopers in Algiers, La Question (Paris: Maspéro, 1957) [The Question (New York: Braziller, 1958)] is only one of the most famous of the participant accounts favorable to independence; other participant or journalistic accounts, often more sympathetic to the French army, appeared in considerable number. 4 I am aware of the political implications of the French government’s vision of la francophonie, and also of the apparent difficulty of labeling postcolonial works published by Algerians before 1962. Nonetheless, I subscribe to the arguments defending the terms, advanced by Charles Fosdick and David Murphy in Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction (London: Arnold, 2003). Although I do not follow her usage, Debra Kelly provides an excellent critical overview of the theoretical implications of our choice of terms in the introduction to her Autobiography and Independence: Selfhood and Creativity in North African Postcolonial Writing in French (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005). 5 (Kateb, Soliloques preface). The phrase “camp de concentration” is Kateb’s. 6 A selection of these plays, reproduced from sketchy manuscripts and sound recordings, appeared in Boucherie de l’Espérance, ed. Zebeida Chergui. Paris: Seuil, 1999. 7 See Marc Gontard’s Nedjma de Kateb Yacine: Essai sur la structure formelle du roman, which, of all the contemporary critiques, goes the furthest toward an analysis of Nedjma in its similarities to the nouveau roman, and also his “A propos de la séquence

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du Nadhor,” in which he defends himself against critics who wish to see Kateb as more “poetic” and particularly Maghrebi than an association with the nouveaux romanciers would imply. Gontard suggests that this view tends to valorize the author in essentialist terms. As for Kateb himself, he did not appreciate that “on a voulu me ‘foutre’ dans le nouveau roman, on a essayé de spéculer sur mon nom” (Corpet, et al. 60). 8 Sellin in turn cited Mohamed Salah-Dembri, who had written acidly about it in an Algerian review in 1967 (Sellin, “Algerian Poetry” 60). Déjeux credits the Moroccan critic and poet Mohamed Aziz Lahbabi as the sole exception among the reviewers of the day to reject the premises of the “Avertissement,” in “Notes sur la culture arabo-musulmane,” Confluent 14, (juillet 1957) (Déjeux, “Réception critique” 114). 9 Nedjma (1956), 6; p. ix in Richard Howard’s English translation. 10 This is not the sentence Erickson discusses, since he situates the misprint in the sentence following the one in which it actually occurs; the “où” in the sentence he cites in fact carries the correct accent in all editions. He points out that the misprint persisted for many years in subsequent printings of the novel (Erickson 30). The preface has disappeared altogether in editions since the mid-1990s. 11 (Deleuze 5). I am not the first to consider Nedjma in the light of Deleuze and Guattari’s work: Bernard Aresu evokes rhizomatic structures in Kateb’s poetics (Aresu 75). 12 The Kitab al-‘Ibar is often translated as A History of the Berbers. The text of the introduction is available English as The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History. Trans. Franz Rosenthal. New York: Pantheon Books, Bollingen Series, 1958. 13 Though Ibn Khaldun called these dynasties “Arabs,” meaning that they were originally nomads, most were Imazighen. Colonial-era readers did not always understand that “Arabs,” for Ibn Khaldun, were not the people so designated by the French: i.e., speakers of dialectal Arabic who considered themselves more arabized than their Tamazight-speaking neighbors. 14 For a sampling of Kateb criticism focused on “space” generally, see the articles in Actualité de Kateb Yacine, as well as Elizabeth Pease’s “L’Espace, la mère, l’impasse: Nedjma de Kateb Yacine,” and Jacqueline Arnaud’s “Les villes mythiques et le mythe de Nedjma dans le roman de Kateb Yacine”; Charles Bonn comments on the prevalence of interest in space in Problématiques spatiales du roman algérien, 33. Jacqueline Arnaud suggests a chronology for Nedjma in Recherches sur la littérature maghrébine de langue française, 671. 15 Citations of Nedjma will give page numbers in the French edition of 1996, unless otherwise specified, and in the English edition of 1991, before and after the slash mark, respectively. 16 Kateb wrote about these in “Le Chômage, cette plaie,” an article for Alger Républican coauthored with Mohammed Dib and Pierre Laffont. 17 Khatibi noted as early as 1968 that Kateb’s complexities meshed with the interests of French intellectuals of the day (Khatibi 101). 18 Eric Sellin and Kristine Aurbakken suggest geometric and arachnean explanations, respectively, while Jean Déjeux protests that Kateb’s lack of intentions regarding the structure should be taken as definitive (Sellin, “The Algerian Novel of French Expression” 43–4; Aurbakken 207; Déjeux, “Réception critique” 101). 19 The founding ceremony itself provided a carefully staged and highly selective aperçu of Bône’s history, as Doumergue listened to a recitation of the city’s capture (“Le Voyage du Président de la République en Algérie,” L’Afrique du Nord illustrée 17 May 1930). 20 Hubert Cataldo reproduces a photograph of the station in his memoirs, and Kateb mentions its unique distinguishing feature (Cataldo n.p.; Kateb, Nedjma 174/246).

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Alek Baylee Toumi and others have stressed Kateb’s secularism, communism, and activism in the Amazigh cultural movement, traits that make unlikely any sympathy with the movement of an Arabizing bourgeois like Ben Badis, whose political goals seemed considerably less radical by the 1950s (Toumi 40, 48–9). Whatever Kateb’s own convictions, he clearly links his character to this movement (Nedjma 148–9/ 208). 22 For the official promotion of the Diar es-Saada, Diar es-Shems, and Diar al-Mahçoul projects, see “Alger, ville-pilote de l’Afrique du Nord,” a special issue of Alger-Revue (May 1955); articles in the same period in Chantiers Nord-Africains, a monthly magazine devoted to public works, provide a more technical view. Zeineb Çelik discusses these projects in Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations (1997). 23 Among spa towns, Si Mokhtar knows Vichy best. Kateb leaves to the reader’s imagination the ironic possibilities of his character’s frequenting Pétain’s future capital. Vichy was in fact a favorite destination between the world wars for rich FrancoAlgerians and the Muslim elite that imitated them. 24 This seems to be a paraphrase of one of several such pronouncements in Ibn Khaldun; cp. his Title 25, “Places that succumb to the Arabs are quickly ruined” (I: 302). Kateb is citing without attribution several pages of a secondary work (Polygone étoilé 81). I have not found these exact words in any source of the period on Ibn Khaldun.

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