on multitude and beyond: an interview with paolo virno

20 6

Cultural Politics, Volume 10, Issue 2, © 2014 Duke University Press DOI: 10.1215/17432197-2651783

On MULTITUDE and BEYONDAn Interview with Paolo Virno

Thierry BardiniTranslated by Briankle G. Chang and Srinivas Lankala

Translation revised by Chris Turner

Abstract With questions addressing ideas central to Virno’s thinking as they relate to prominent trends in critical theories over the past decades, this interview helps illuminate Virno’s position as an engaged intellectual and the continued relevance of his thought to the emancipatory project initiated by Marxism in the last century.

Keywords autonomia; identity; individualism; Marxism; multiplicity

Paolo Virno is an Italian political theorist and philosopher. He is best known to English- speaking readers as the

author of A Grammar of the Multitude (2004) and Multitude between Innovation and Negation (2008). Virno’s political theory is closely linked to his early activist experiences that began in the late 1960s, when he joined the labor movement and campaigned in the organization of Potere Operaio (Work-ers’ Power), which is part of a broader “workerist” movement (operaismo). In 1979, Virno was jailed on charges of belonging to the Red Brigades. He was sentenced in 1982 to twelve years in prison and acquitted eventually in 1987. During the years of his imprisonment, Virno turned his thinking toward philosophy, blending practice- oriented Marxist ideas with linguistic reflections as well as analyses of mass media as

On MULTITUDE and BEYOND

CU

LTU

RA

L P

OL

ITIC

S2

07

On MULTITUDE and BEYONDAn Interview with Paolo Virno

Thierry BardiniTranslated by Briankle G. Chang and Srinivas Lankala

Translation revised by Chris Turner

they relate to the problems regarding work or labor in contemporary postindustrial capitalism.

Thierry Bardini: There are essentially two texts of yours that made me want to meet you for this project: Grammaire de la multitude (Grammar of the Multitude), in which you write at several points of the question of individuation, and then this other text that some of my friends from Multitudes had sent me a little before its publication, “Les anges et le general intellect” (“Angels and the General Intel-lect”).1 First of all, I should say how much I enjoyed seeing “angels” and “general intellect” in the same title, which was quite a prodigious achievement! [Laughter] The first question I would like to ask you, in fact, concerns the conditions of genesis of these two texts. So far as Grammaire de la multitude is concerned, from the edito-rial comments I understand that to have emerged primarily from a seminar. But I would like you to explain a little how you came to ask yourself these questions and, in particular, the thinking on individuation that’s presented in the second text, “Les anges et le general intellect.”

Paolo Virno: The thoughts that I had developed on the principles of individua-tion in Grammaire de la multitude, I then condensed into an article called “Multitude and Principles of Individuation,” which appeared also in Conjonctures and logically and temporally preceded “Les anges et le general intellect.” These are two inter-linked pieces that speak to each other, where the second piece is obviously developing the arguments of the first. But in fact, the question of individuation has always troubled me. My first book, which was called Convention et matérialisme (Convention and Materialism), and which

appeared at the beginning of the 1980s, already contained a chapter titled “The Principle of Individuation.” This chapter, as well as the whole book, reflected a very old passion and a very long engagement with this problem. Grammaire de la multitude did, in fact, originate as a seminar, so its very obvious limits and its potential value therefore depended on an oral tone that remained in the transcription and the editing, both of which I did myself. It was concerned with portraying a category as well as a human character- type that had become, to my mind, characteristic of our age: the multitude. Multitude: that means . . . well, it’s very easy in Italian, and even in English, to say “many, molti, muchos.” In French, it’s not so simple: “plusieurs” doesn’t work, and I’m not so sure about “multiple” or “beaucoup.” They are . . . the “multiples,” in quotes, the multi-ples are individuals. But the multitude, as a number of people, a number of individuals, is opposed to the concept of a people, which is itself composed of individuals. What is the difference, then, between the individuals who compose the multitude and the individuals who compose the people? That is the very recent question addressed in Grammaire de la multitude. My answer to this question, in a highly abridged form, is as follows: the individual who gives rise to the multitude is an individuated individual, that is to say the extreme result, the final result, of a process of individuation. On the other hand, the individual who makes up the people is, by definition, an immediate given, that is to say the point of departure, not the result of a process. That is why the individual as people (en tant que peuple) needs a form of universality that would be a means of making his life, his existence, his experience, et cetera, more powerful. This form of universality, in modernity, has taken the name of the “central state.” The

Paolo Virno interviewed by Thierry BardiniC

ULT

UR

AL

PO

LIT

ICS

• 1

0:2

July

201

42

08

figures, the concepts of sovereignty of the state, are therefore nothing other than the universality of an individual who has not passed through a process of individuation, but who represents the point of departure. An absolute given. Something that has already been there forever.

TB: In this sense, could we say a non-singular individual?

PV: Yes, we could. That is a good way of putting things. The individual who com-poses the multitude, to my mind, as the result of a process, has, behind him, some-thing that is not individual. That is to say a — I am simply citing [Gilbert] Simondon here — “preindividual reality.” One might start to sketch this out as a sort of topol-ogy of relations between the individual and, let us say, the “universal” in quotes. The individual, as the people, has in front of him universality. Universality as prom-ise. While the individual, who is the result of a process of individuation and who composes the multitude has universality, or, in philosophy, the One, behind him. So the real issue, in my opinion, in any discus-sion of the principle of individuation — and this is very clear in Simondon — is not only the individual, or perhaps, is not especially the individual. The real issue is, in the first place, the form of universality that is the pole linked to individuality. The form, the definition of universality as the State. Universality as promise or universality as premise. Promise or premise. And I think [John] Duns Scotus and Simondon have been like Christopher Columbus, in that they were looking for the Indies, that is to say the individuated individual, but they found instead this universal reality, completely unknown in Western thinking: a universality that precedes, and that is the premise of, the individual. A

preindividual reality. Duns Scotus spoke about a common nature, and Simondon talks about a preindividual reality. This preindividual reality is the America of Duns Scotus and Simondon. It is no doubt true that they said a lot of remarkable things about individuation and the individual as individual, but the most remarkable result of their works consists in the individua-tion of . . . if you will permit me a play on words . . . the common, the individua-tion of common nature. And I would like straightaway to put forward here — to test the water, as it were — what I think about this common nature. I think this common nature is anthropological, or if you like, human, biological. That implies the whole set of characters that defines our species in distinguishing them from other animals. Therefore, when I think about preindivid-ual reality or, with Duns Scotus, about the common nature that precedes and makes individuation possible, I think about the faculty of language. I think about the completely human capacity of being able to abstract, to imagine, to think through words. Thoughts as verbal thoughts, et cetera. A whole set of faculties that are therefore never mine or yours, but that are always between us, that are always tra, in Italian, “between.” We say tra. Trans, transindividual. You have the word transindividuale in Italian. It’s very good because it contains the preposition tra, that is to say, “between.” That which cannot exist except “between.” The singular subject is between the individuals; this is why we can talk literally about a reality that is not interior — that is outside of us, that is out-side of our spirit, that places itself always between individuals. This brings us to the problem that Toni Negri, for example, has put to me several times. If you say that the preindividual reality, the common nature, that precedes and makes the individuation


CU

LTU

RA

L P

OL

ITIC

S2

09

of singular subjects possible; if you say that this consists of human nature, that is to say of generic faculties that charac-terize the species Homo sapiens, you are proposing to us a notion and a concept of common nature that is dehistoricized. That is to say, a concept that is already there in the Cro- Magnon period. My response, in an abridged form, is as follows: No, I believe that what constitutes a period, that is to say, the signs of historical devel-opment, is the way these fundamental faculties become perceptible, evident, and the very object of human praxis. I propose this little schema. The thing that counts for a really historical concept of history is the constant rapport between the “forever” (depuis toujours) and the “only now.” In other words, one can appreciate what is going on, what is happening only today, if one has the capacity for noticing in this moment in time a completely particular — unprecedented, if you like — manner of re- presenting that which has had value forever. The problem therefore becomes: how do these fundamental faculties that constitute common nature, which pre-cedes individuation and makes it possible, present themselves? Here you find a kind of link between history and nature or, if you like, here is a foundation for a project of natural history, in this particular sense that I have been talking about. So the prob-lem here is these preindividual faculties in the form of common nature.

TB: So can we say that the kind of history you are talking about comes in with the appropriation of these faculties, the pro-cess of their actualization? That evidently brings to mind [Ferdinand de] Saussure’s old dualism between langue and parole: parole is historical, langue is an abstract, preexisting system, which at the same time allows for this appropriation. So the

interesting thing here is that there is a paradoxical relation between them, a little bit “chicken- and- egg.”

PV: [Laughter] Yes. It is circular, absolutely circular.

TB: Now that is something that we can return to later, if you like. But before that I would like to turn particularly to things you have written on this subject: primar-ily because I would not like you to have to repeat yourself, but rather perhaps to throw more light on certain things. In the text “Les anges et le general intellect,” you wrote that there are three orders of issues around the deployment of the prob-lematic of individuation: logical, metaphys-ical, and political. In this interview, we are going to deal mainly with the third, which to me seems the place where your con-tributions have been the most powerful. But before that, I would like to also return to the two others because it seems to me that what you are saying there is very interesting but also possibly very compli-cated and has great potential for the future. In terms of the logical issues, you indirectly evoke, without saying so, the necessity of a non- Aristotelian logic for reflecting on individuation. You write that “to think adequately about ‘common nature’ (or the preindividual), from which the individuated individual descends, it is perhaps advis-able to renounce the principles of identity and of the excluded middle.” You seem therefore to propose to give up on two of the three main principles of an Aristotelian logic. If you like, we will return soon to the equivalence between common nature and the preindividual, because it is perhaps not as evident as all that. But for the moment, when you say that we can perhaps renounce these principles, do you mean to say that it is appropriate for you, for your


ULT

UR

AL

PO

LIT

ICS

• 1

0:2

July

201

421

0

thoughts on individuation, to give up on Aristotelian logic, or in any case these two foundational principles. Is this something you only evoke as a possibility, or rather as a necessity?

PV: In reality, these are the subjects, the themes on which I have been working for the last ten years at least: philosophy of language and logic. I am in the process of writing a text devoted precisely to the rela-tion between logic and anthropology, for example. What type of animal is this that can say “no,” that has access to negation or to the modality of the possible, or again, that always risks falling into an infinite regression? I think these three logical oper-ators, or these three logical figures, have a strong anthropological core, which means they have the means to define our species. A species that can negate, a species that can have recourse to the possible, a spe-cies that can fall into an infinite regression. This is only to say that I am really mainly interested in the question that I evoke here and that I have not treated in detail in the texts that we are talking about today. In short, I think that one can resort to the non- Aristotelian logic of a Chilean psycho-analyst called Matte Blanco. He worked in London and Rome and wrote a very important book called The Unconscious as Infinite Sets: An Essay on Bi Logic (1975). Where the unconscious is concerned, this book proposes a logic the author calls “symmetrical.” That means, for example: you are my father, but I am your father, too. The subject and the predicate imply each other reciprocally. For him, this logic is a branch of the contemporary logic that has focused study on infinite sets, such as the work of [Georg] Cantor, et cetera. Matte Blanco truly worked with, and in relation to, logicians and mathematicians. But let us return to our

question, the relation between the indi-vidual and common nature from a logical perspective. I would simply like to say that, by “common nature,” one can also mean “species,” and therefore, conceive the relation between species and individual according to the schema of symmetrical logic. Conceived thus, the individual is at the same time both less and more than the species. Precisely because individuation has occurred, because an actualization of the potential faculties of the species has taken place. So the individual is precisely that which cannot be reduced to the definition of the species. But the spe-cies com prises in itself a multiplicity of possible individuations and is not reduc-ible to this individuation, not merely to this particular individuation. The notion of species comprises, above all, the relation “between” — entre, tra — a multiplicity of individuals. Therefore, the species, in turn, is both something more and something less compared to an individual. One could say: the individual is the whole of which the species is a part, and the species, on the contrary, is the whole of which the individual is a part. So this is how the principle of the excluded middle and the classical principle of noncontradiction can be provisionally laid aside, in thinking, in reflecting, on the relations between species and individual; more and less; the species in relation to the individual, the individual in relation to the species. And I believe, I don’t know, I’m not sure, but I believe that our species is characterized precisely by the process of individuation, that is to say, by a distance between the individual and the species. This distance can come from verbal language, from self- consciousness, the consciousness of self. . . . There are a lot of possible causes one can invoke to justify this distance. But this distance is also sin. Religious sin, that is to


CU

LTU

RA

L P

OL

ITIC

S21

1

say, the source of a nostalgia, of an — abso-lute — melancholy, of a will — and here is the infinite regression — of a return to the origin, that is to say to a preindividual real-ity, where there was not yet this original, primal sin of individuation. Of the fracture between the common and the individual. I believe, I don’t know [Carl] Jung, I know only certain theologians to some small degree, but I am convinced all the same that the theme of individuation is continu-ously intermixed with the theme of sin.

TB: I think that one can refer to those three types of individuation Simondon talks about all the time. The individuation you are talking about now is the third kind of individuation for Simondon, the one he calls psychical or collective. Because he conceives individuals who are nothing but physical individuals or living individu-als, while the human being is for him at the same time a physical individual and a living individual, and finally by this third specific individuation, a psychical individ-ual. What is interesting in Jung’s work is that his individuation is very different from that of [Sigmund] Freud; he thinks that it is something that culminates around the middle of life. And in fact, the individua-tion he is talking about is liberation from the superego. So there is a relation, in effect, to this sin that you mentioned, to this melancholy, and so on. In Jung’s work, as indeed in Simondon’s, very great reference is made to anxiety. You talk of melancholy, nostalgia; in the work of these two authors, there is also this basic anxiety, which goes with the psyche, in fact, and which is perhaps the first of the affects. Which can go back to a very early moment in life, but which accompanies us, at least according to Jung, so long as we have not achieved this complete individua-tion that liberates us from a superego that

oppresses us permanently. Therefore there are indeed many relations to these things. So far as this evocation or invocation of a non- Aristotelian logic is concerned — and it is important to say “non- Aristotelian” instead of “anti- Aristotelian” — it is just a way of keeping a distance, as you said. For me, this evokes philosophical and scientific projects of the twentieth century that were built on this question. I am thinking, of course, of the physics of relativity and quantum physics, which are mainly built on these principles, but nearer to us, in the social sciences, I have in mind the unfortunately often- forgotten Polish Count Alfred Korzybski and his general semantics, which devel-oped this question. One can say, to a large extent, that because of the way this was taken up by Gregory Bateson and others, there was something quite foundational here for a certain form of twentieth- century social science, which is perhaps a little too hastily described as relativist or constructivist. Do these projects resonate with your project, do you situate yourself a little within this perspective, or is the logic of Matte Blanco your main relation to it?

PV: I met Matte Blanco in an entirely con-tingent way and I hold him in high regard, especially for his work in logic, mathemat-ics; but in any case, I believe that there are a number of other means or instruments that one can use along with, or instead of, the logic of Matte Blanco. I took his work as an example because it is very con-centrated and very clear. When one says “symmetrical logic,” this provides a good image of the individual/species question. As for Bateson, I believe that his work remains a landmark. A landmark that is perhaps a little distorted by the New Age tendencies that have ruined or manipulated it. But that is not such a serious thing,


ULT

UR

AL

PO

LIT

ICS

• 1

0:2

July

201

421

2

because there was a strong core of his thought. I am thinking here of his thinking on paradoxes, circularity, and paradoxicality as a general condition of experience, or as the very structure of experience. And this thinking on circularity, on paradoxicality — I’m thinking of the work of Bateson on play — is absolutely fundamental.

TB: Another question that follows from the preceding one: Is it not to some extent a little bit paradoxical to call for a renuncia-tion of the logic of Aristotle, or in any case for keeping one’s distance from these two principles, and at the same time to con-tinue to base reflection on individuation on the thought of Duns Scotus, for example? Because Duns Scotus, like the majority of thinkers of his period, in fact tried to reconcile the Scriptures with Aristotle. Aristotelian logic seems to me to be very much present in the work of Saint Thomas [Aquinas] or Duns Scotus. There is thus a certain distance also, when one reflects on paradoxicality, on circularity, understood here with this base, in the work of Duns Scotus, from the thinking on individuation. Yes or no?

PV: I remain, like everyone else, attached to Aristotle as a naturalistic thinker who reconciled biology and language. Therefore I believe that, if you reread the works of Aristotle, starting from completely contem-porary questions, you find something more substantial than many of the things found in cognitive psychology, for example. But I also believe that even Aristotle, when he is engaged with modal logic, finds him-self having to cross the boundaries of the principle of contradiction. There is what I call the paradox of contingency, that is to say, it is possible that X would be, that X is, if and only if, it is possible that X is not. Therefore, the modality that Aristotle

calls bidirectional — that is to say, to be able to be if and only if to be able not to be — places us already beyond the principle of noncontradiction. Aristotle himself, in book Gamma of the Metaphysics, under-scores cases in the use of language, in sensory experience, which cannot be submitted to this principle. I would like to avoid a form of marginality in relation to the big questions of philosophy. That is to say, a sort of island where those who do not have the strength to settle their accounts with Aristotle find refuge. . . . All forms of marginality, in my view, must be avoided. And therefore the question, concerning the principles of individuation, could be devel-oped on the basis of an expression from Karl Marx that I find very striking. It is Marx who talked about a social individual. And one must pay attention, because this is not some Hegelian coquetry. That is to say, the individual that Marx is talking about is really an individual, and he is an individ-ual precisely because he is social to the maximum extent. This is something that Simondon’s thesis concerning collective individuation also suggests to us: namely, that collective experience and group expe-rience are not a diminution of individuality, but on the contrary an accentuation.

TB: I had a further question that would have also gone in this direction, before even tackling the political issues, because, where the metaphysical issues are concerned, you had said “in light of the link between common and singular, it is permissible to postulate the existence of a prior intersubjectivity, preceding even the formation of distinct subjects.” It seems to me that what you just said is going entirely in this direction. But what seems interest-ing to me is when you say: “it is permissi-ble to postulate,” but I understand that you make this postulation. That is to say that,


CU

LTU

RA

L P

OL

ITIC

S21

3

in opposition to the cognitive sciences that you present at one point, you postulate a distinct subject that could be said to pre-exist this individual subject, between the individual subjects, as it were. So here we find ourselves very much inside a paradox.

PV: I often think of the works of the Russian psychologist [Lev] Vygotsky, who said precisely that. That is to say, “the we precedes the I” or the self. But it is very empirical, very scientific. Andy Clark, who is a brilliant writer of heterodox cognitive science, takes over Vygotsky’s position when he says that the intrapsychic plane is the product of an interpsychic plane. This means that the same thing applies to thought, to language, that is to say, to the beginning of our experience: there is no “I think,” but there is the verbal exchange with what surrounds us. And the formation of the mind derives from the introjection of the interpsychic plane and this introjection that forms the self- consciousness, the reflexive “I,” the “I” that is able to speak of itself, et cetera. This is, in short, the idea that is very empirical and is proved with concrete experiments by Vygotsky. And now, the discovery of mirror neurons: what does this discovery mean? What is its significance? There is an intersubjectiv-ity located in the brain that precedes the constitution of an individual subject.

TB: I have two questions with regard to that. First, one speaks of the psyche, of the brain. Can one extend this also to the unconscious part and not only to the conscious?

PV: Yes.

TB: And in this case, one can think of the Jungian concept, for example, of a collective unconscious that seems to me

to be a projection somewhat of this same thing. The second question is: Is going in this direction, also implying going in the direction — very important in history — of a single mind, a monopsyche, or of a pan-psyche, or something of the sort?

PV: The “general intellect” as a metaphys-ical concept. . . . One can very well, but I would not like to treat this concept like an economico- political concept. This is the outcome of a very long tradition that dates back to the Arab philosophers, and to Averroes in particular. Averroes devised the concept of the “agent (or active) intel-lect” as something collective, and it is for this that he brought down on himself the curses of Saint Thomas, among others, who consider him to be the inventor of the greatest of heresies. It is Aquinas who proposes a concept of individuation completely contrary to that of Scotus, and who considers the factor of individu-ation, in matter, only in matter, therefore angels . . . it follows from this that angels have no individuality.

TB: Of course. Or that each is its own species, in fact. Which does not mean that they do not have individuality, but rather that there cannot be several individuals in the same species of angel. So all of this brings us to the same thing. On this point, Duns Scotus succeeded in responding to Aquinas and to Averroes at the same time. Though he does not agree with Aquinas, in particular, on the question of individua-tion, he does not, for all that, revert to the notion of a single spirit and risk returning to what was the subject of the “great condemnation” of 1277, where this prop-osition is taken up again in the following form: man does not think, he is thought. Now that is terrible, it is anathema for the Catholic thought of the time. Duns Scotus


ULT

UR

AL

PO

LIT

ICS

• 1

0:2

July

201

421

4

is very subtle — he was known as the “Subtle Doctor,” after all — in avoiding this proposition even as he comes close to it. He approaches it, but keeps a respectful distance. I believe that now we can return to this question, from its political side.

PV: By the way, the political elaboration relating to the concept of the multitude, or of “general intellect,” dates back to the beginning of the 1990s. And it is like those dead stars that still cast their light, but that do not concern me much anymore. I have some political responsibilities, I continue to link my research in logic or the philosophy of language to the political theme of glo-balization, or of the “general intellect,” or of the multitude. But the passionate center of my research is concerned with these themes of logic and linguistics.

TB: OK, so the first question now is do you draw a distinction between what you call the generic and the preindividual, or are these two concepts quite often interchangeable?

PV: Marx, in his writings, and in partic-ular in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, talked of Gattungswesen — “species- being,” that is to say, the generic being, the common being of the species, as such. This is from an expression taken from [Ludwig] Feuer-bach, the idea of a Gattungswesen, and so I sometimes use the expression generic in this sense, to evoke this undifferentiated potentiality that must be actualized and specified by the act — that is to say, individ-uation, the singular individual. Therefore, in this sense, in reality I treat generic and preindividual as synonyms.

TB: I am thinking here of a somewhat long extract from Grammaire de la multitude,

which I am not going to read out in its entirety but which I have found very use-ful, because in it you mention three possi-ble ways of talking about the preindividual: the biological base of the species, the language, and then the “general intellect.” A first question came to mind, thinking about the end of this excerpt, when you say: “The dominant relation of produc-tion is preindividual, the set of productive forces is preindividual. It is the ‘general intellect,’ the ‘general, objective, extrinsic . . . intellect.’ ” That made me think of something else, which seemed to me to be very different and about which I would like to ask you some more. Following this connection, I think it’s right perhaps to specify the relation, if there is one, between this “general intellect” and what [Pierre] Teilhard de Chardin called the noo-sphere, which some of his disciples — I am thinking of Pierre Lévy, among others — see realized in the World Wide Web. Do you see a link there, or is this a connection that would not be to your liking?

PV: No, this relation does not trouble me. I would like to emphasize, however, that by general intellect, what I mean to say is not the thoughts already thought, that is to say, that are current; what I rather mean is potential faculties, hence potential thoughts, let us say the source of all possi-ble thoughts.

TB: OK. In this sense, there is certainly a fundamental difference, however, from what Teilhard de Chardin says. For him, the noosphere is not something potential or virtual, but rather a result to be attained, so far as the famous Omega Point and other such things are concerned. In turn, to con-tinue on these lines, you say at one point: “This will seem perhaps a little paradoxi-cal, but I believe that Marx’s theory could,


CU

LTU

RA

L P

OL

ITIC

S21

5

and in fact should, be understood today as a realist, complex theory of the individual, as a rigorous individualism, hence as a theory of individuation.” The first question that I want to ask you is: What is it that militates today, and at the moment you wrote these lines, and by opposition to the moment of the creation of Marxist theory, for one having to understand Marx’s the-ory in such a way?

PV: I believe that one of Marx’s idées fixes was also, in a philological sense, the valorization of the contingent, finite individual. When he was young, he wrote precisely that one has to liberate the individual from real abstractions, that is to say, from money, from the state. Therefore I believe that the problem once more is the valorized individual. But the valorized individual is an outcome, not a point of departure, not a beginning. This is why I find the expression “social individual” important, which signifies, in my view, that the individual is maximally an individual insofar as he is maximally social. This is Marx against Marxism, obviously. It has been there a long time, perhaps forever, and perhaps it was a problem for Marx also. But in any case, what is in question is the construction of an institutional, ethical, emotive relationship between the preindividual and the individuated. Anxiety, if I am not wrong, for Simondon, arises precisely when this relationship between the preindividual part of the subject and the individuated part of the subject is a sick, unbalanced relationship. So there is the preindividual that includes what there is in the subject that is individuated, or vice versa, the individuated aspects of the sub-ject that want to comprise the preindivid-ual reality in themselves, to capture it, to reduce it to themselves. We have here two sources of anxiety. The preindividual that

captures the individuated or vice versa.

TB: In fact, Simondon seems ambivalent about anxiety, since he says, on the one hand, that it is the edge of being (there is therefore a valorization of this anxiety) and, on the other, that he considers it catastrophic when it is characterized as an effort on the part of the individual to arrive at his individuation as if he were the sole cause of it. So he sets up this tension very well, and that leads us to think that he differentiates two anxieties within this primordial anxiety.

PV: Yes, that’s true. I hadn’t noticed that, but it’s true, there is an ambivalence.

TB: That resonates with a lot of contem-porary work concerning the two types of possible disindividuation. One sees that in the work of [Bernard] Stiegler, for example, this thematic of disindividuation, of the hypermodern individual, submitting to the paradoxical injunctions of the type: conform through singularity, et cetera. We can talk about that a little later, if you like. I just wanted to come back once more to this quote that I find very interesting, since you say that Marx’s theory will be able to be understood today as a “realist, complex theory of the individual.” I find this word realist interesting, and I was wondering if it was in the scholastic sense that you use it, that is to say, in opposition, obviously, to nominalism. Duns Scotus is perhaps the greatest thinker of a moderate realism, that is to say, of a belief in universals, which places him in opposition to the nominalism of William of Ockham. Would there be something of that sense in this realist, or was it simply a more primary sense of the word realist that you were referring to here?


ULT

UR

AL

PO

LIT

ICS

• 1

0:2

July

201

421

6

PV: In those lines, I was using the term realist in the primary sense, that is to say, in the sense of “that which measures up with reality.” But, I share your opinion and I also believe that Marx elaborated a sort of moderate realism, for example when he talks of the “general intellect,” but also when he talks about “real abstractions.” I use the adjective moderate because he thinks these abstractions are also a prod-uct of history.

TB: And also perhaps because one must set this moderate realism against a total idealism that believes in the absolutely real existence of ideas, perhaps even in a pla-tonic mode. That is not what is generally meant by moderate realism. . . .

PV: Marx’s maturity, his metaphysical and philosophical interest, lies precisely in his opposition to [Georg W. F.] Hegel, to the idealism of Hegel, not at all in the name of an empiricist nominalism but in elaborating a moderate realism. Hence, against ideal-ism, realism; against idealism, certainly not nominalism. And that is what is interesting about Marx. Therefore I used the adjective realist to say that a theory of the individual that would not at the same time be a the-ory of individuation, that would not sketch out the preindividual forces of experience, is not realist. Without describing these forces, the preindividual aspects of the human mind and of contemporary histori-cal experience, every discourse on the indi-vidual is entirely parodic, not realist.

TB: It seems to me that this resonates with the question of relativism in the social sciences. There are two names that come to mind when one talks of relativism, [Wilhelm von] Humboldt and Benjamin Lee Whorf. And strangely, where the second is concerned, there is this notion

that there exist universals of language, even if his thought has given birth, in a way, to relativism, because of his hypoth-esis of linguistic or cultural relativity (the Sapir- Whorf hypothesis). Therefore, there is also in Whorf’s work a kind of moder-ate realism. We don’t really know Whorf when we reduce him to his hypothesis on cultural relativity, because he was seeking the universals of language.

PV: Yes, that is true. That was the great ambiguity about Whorf, an ambiguity produced not so much by [Noam] Chom-sky as by Chomskyans. The Chomskyan polemic against Saussure, against lan-guage, in the name of a language faculty, had among its victims poor Whorf, who had developed theories and observations that were quite appreciable, quite impor-tant, but which are now reduced to a joke by the Chomskyans. . . .

TB: Yes. We will not linger too long on this topic, but it so happens that this Mr. Whorf is one of my favorite authors, perhaps because of his life, as well, because he was not a recognized intellectual: he never worked for the university but as an insur-ance inspector! [Laughter]

PV: Admirable! [Laughter]

TB: Another thing, perhaps, with the same sense as this linkage: there is in Simon-don’s work a discourse of alienation that some have linked to that of Marx. Is this link one of the elements that also militates for the “paradoxical” understanding of Marx that you propose?

PV: This question is very interesting, and it is so interesting that I do not know how to answer with any precision. But what has always struck me, since I’ve been reading


CU

LTU

RA

L P

OL

ITIC

S21

7

Simondon, is his idea of technique. Why? Because technology is materialization. I shall also use the term reification, but in a positive sense; it is the reification of the preindividual. That which is between subjects, between individuals finds its material, exterior, sensory, spatiotemporal reality in technological objects. Hence the discourse on technology merely follows up the discourse on the preindividual. There are some pages in Simondon’s book on technique where technology is opposed to work. Simondon says: technique has always been an articulation of social labor, but it should be said rather that the logic of technique is different, and also opposed to that of work. Why? Because the logic of work is, take note, interindividual, while the logic of the technical object is transindividual. So transindividual means the development of the preindividual element. Marx, in the pages where he talks about the “general intellect,” says that this general intellect, which summarizes in itself science, knowledge, the social brain, the cooperative — today one would say linguistic — faculties of humankind, renders work as fatigue — in the words of Marx — a “miserable residue.” Hence, I don’t mean that Marx’s analysis distinguishes between technique and work. He shows the interlinking between work and technique. But at the height of his elaboration, in the pages dedicated to the general intellect, he distinguishes and opposes, in a fashion similar, I believe, to that of Simondon, technique, on the one hand, and work, on the other.

TB: It is interesting, moreover, that this extract, this passage from Marx, should be referred to as the “fragment on machines.”

PV: This text was translated into Italian, at the beginning of the 1960s, in a journal

titled Red Notebooks (Quaderni Rossi), which began from what we call Italian operaismo, of which the most celebrated name is Negri (but there are many others, as well). This reflection on the general intellect remained for decades a sort of landmark whose value has changed in different theoretical, political, or ethical conjunctures. There was always a sort of possible ulterior signification to the general intellect.

TB: It seems to me that in the work of [Guy] Debord, for example, with the refusal of alienated work, there is already something along these lines, and in [Arthur] Rimbaud’s writings also, there is this slogan: “Never shall we work.” It is in another passage of Grammaire de la multitude, where you talk about the social struggles of the 1960s and the 1970s and where you talk about these protests and these typically Italian movements. Most notably, you talk about “a marked taste for difference, or, if one prefers, the refinement of the principle of individua-tion.” There are several questions that I have with regard to that. You talk about post- Fordism, which represents a riposte to this revolution, to this failed, or partially successful, revolution of the 1970s; you talk about a communism of capital that you oppose to the socialism of capital. . . . Can we understand this to mean that in this notion of a riposte to a revolution — failed or successful is not so important — but of a capitalist riposte, capitalism can be said to have integrated, in the sense of [Theodor] Adorno and [Max] Horkheimer, or recycled even, to use more contemporary language, this aspect of the revolutionary critique of the 1960s and 1970s?

PV: More than revolutionary critique, I believe that contemporary capitalism


ULT

UR

AL

PO

LIT

ICS

• 1

0:2

July

201

421

8

based on the “general intellect” has integrated the behaviors within the move-ments in question, in particular the taste for individuality, which was very much linked to the taste for community. I know very well the movement of the 1960s in the United States, I know less of the movements of the 1970s and 1980s in the United States and in North America generally. But I believe that the revolution-ary or subversive movements anticipated the links between work and language that became the driving force of contempo-rary capitalism. Previously, in the Fordist period, work used to be mute, taciturn. . . . With post- Fordism, it is the opposite; language has become the raw material and fundamental instrument of work. The capi-talist counterrevolution, which is not, to be clear, solely repression but rather a capture of the productive forces that had been exhibited by the revolutionary movements, included in itself the productive force of language.

TB: I believe that there is really this intu-ition in Frankfurt, with Horkheimer and Adorno, and their critique of the culture industries; this notion of capitalism already, at that time, developing itself by constantly recycling its worst critiques. . . . To the extent that one can ask oneself now if The Society of the Spectacle isn’t the manual for the head of an advertising agency or something like that. . . .

PV: This is certainly true in Italy, where the head of television is an ex- Situationist! I believe however that the mistake Adorno and Horkheimer made about the culture industry is to have thought that there was a regulation, a Fordist uniformity of — let’s call it spiritual, cultural, linguistic — productivity. While in the culture industries of the time of Adorno and his friends, the

problem was already one of valorizing the unusual, the out- of- the- box.

TB: Another question, now, and perhaps a more concrete one: Can you specify, starting with your own activist experience, the place or role that this “refinement of the principle of individuation” has assumed in this integration, that is to say, in social relations? I do not want to only allude to your work as a theoretician, but also to your direct relationship to these things.

PV: Starting in the early 1980s, in social experience, one could see how there was a preference for all that was not common, a sort of morbid individualism. A morbid, exacerbated individualism, which was nonetheless the sign of a problem that was going to grow and impose itself. Bertolt Brecht talks about the “bad new,” that is to say, the horrible, sometimes terrifying face with which the new, principal problem of our age announces itself. The problem of individuation as a problem other than meta-physical, logical, and political announced itself with the terrible face of the rampant opportunism and cynicism that won out, in Italy and in Europe at least, during the 1980s and 1990s. Hence one heard the call of the individual, of the value of the indi-vidual, of his/her singularity. It is an ambiv-alent call. It is the call of Marx, I believe also, when I was talking about his realist theory. . . . But it is also the pivot of a fierce attitude to one’s fellow- men. The individual is the sign of contradiction in the evangelical sense of the term. It is the original sin that can become the principle of hope. Hence in my experience, there was this passing from a phase where the individual, the pronoun “I” was marginal and abominated, to a phase where what counted was only the “I,” which won out over one’s fellows, over others, et cetera. This is why, or at least it


CU

LTU

RA

L P

OL

ITIC

S21

9

is also why, I have concerned myself with the principle of individuation, to seek in it the possibility of turning things around, of turning around this situation where the indi-vidual is absolute good or evil. To attempt to conceive the individual as a mixed element in a more complex process that has its source in preindividual forces. Among the thinkers of common nature, I would also like to bring up certain logicians, such as [Gottlob] Frege, when he talked about this Third Kingdom in which thoughts do not belong to a particular subject anymore, but are common, objective thoughts. He was evoking once again, I believe, the pre- and transindividual force of the “general intel-lect.” There is the old debate, dating back to the beginning of the twentieth century, between logic and psychology, which is very interesting for the concerns of our interview. Because psychologists had their reasons, but logic is very important where the transindividual level is concerned. I now share the opinions of the logicians rather than those of the psychologists.

TB: That also played out, it would seem, at the Sorbonne, in the opposition between [Émile] Durkheim and [Henri] Bergson. . . .

PV: Indeed. I am pro- Durkheim. . . . But, let us be clear, in relation to this problem only, that the social fact — this is Durk-heim’s category — is not reducible to the sum of individual psychologies. And there is a “we” that is prior in relation to the sum of the “selves” or the “I’s.”

TB: There is, indeed, a third way there, in the great debates of the 1980s, between individualism and holism in the social sciences. . . .

PV: Yes. . . .

TB: All the antiutilitarian movements, which replay this question once more, per-haps because this is a fundamental aporia in the social sciences, perhaps because this is always going to be with us as a problem, understood not as an obstacle, but as an engine of reflection.

PV: Yes. . . .

TB: To continue on this path a little, there is another expression that recurs a lot in this book. It is that of nonrepresentative democracy, which is presented rather as a horizon. In what sense could one say that post- Fordist capitalism can lead to this nonrepresentative democracy? It seems to be somewhat of an organizing theme in what you wrote. Can you clarify what you mean by nonrepresentative democracy?

PV: One has to always return to the problem of individuation, to universality no longer as promise, but as premise. That means that the individuated individ-ual is the final result of a process. But as the final result of a process, the singu-lar individual cannot, and especially no longer wants to, delegate anything. One can delegate, sure, that is completely reasonable; the circuits of representative democracy are completely reasonable, if the universal, the One, is in front of us as a promise. But if the universal, as “gen-eral intellect,” the faculty of language, the faculty of thought, is behind us as a sort of premise or common base or again as common nature, then the individual is a kind of full reality, who no longer rep-resents himself by delegation. Hence, it is a completely structural reason, not an anarchist or extremist opinion, that makes me wish and hope for nonrepresentative democracy. If the relation between the preindividual dimension and the individual,


ULT

UR

AL

PO

LIT

ICS

• 1

0:2

July

201

42

20

the individuated subject, is as we have just said, the question of sovereignty in general, of the State in general, but more concretely of the circuits of representative democracy, presents itself as eminently problematic. Obviously, one can imagine substituting, replacing the classical circuits of representative democracy by another form. In Italy, [Silvio] Berlusconi proposes one that resembles the logic of a business enterprise, or through plebiscite mech-anisms, et cetera, but these are always responses to a structural crisis.

TB: Are there contemporary movements, social movements where you find this kind of mechanism already at work, that is to say a form of nonrepresentative democ-racy? I am thinking, in particular, about all those movements that take the adjective free as a header.

PV: [Laughter]

TB: The free software movement, all these movements that are right now outstripping the technological, IT culture, in the cultural industries, like peer- to- peer, always on the frontier between legal and illegal. . . . Do these seem like contempo-rary actualizations of organizational forms that run in this direction?

PV: These are the beginnings of move-ments going in this direction. The problem that, in my opinion, is destined to remain the principal problem for a long time, is that one cannot, shall we say, liberate or improve the conditions of work with-out constituting at the same time a new public sphere. The very close relationship between these two dimensions today blocks everything, and even the demands of labor. The complication is that one cannot organize precarious intellectual

labor without organizing nonrepresenta-tive democracy. The stakes are so big, so important, that it is creating a certain paral-ysis. . . . The experiments that you refer to are, no doubt, approaches to the question of nonrepresentative democracy. But they are only dealing with beginnings, outlines, like the alter- globalization movement is also a beginning that we know very well. It is very interesting because it represents, in itself, a link between the preindividual and the individuated, but it also shows or dis-plays the paralysis that I was talking about.

TB: What I found interesting when I stud-ied these movements was the question of leadership. Because there are the remains of representative democracy, with the very great temptation for the media, and even for the movement itself, of individualizing the leadership, of having a public face, and at the same time there are new forms of leadership, anonymous leaders, revolving leaders, disguised leaders. I am even think-ing of political movements, like the one we saw in Chiapas, with Subcomandante Marcos and his iconic balaclava.

PV: Yes, disguised, but personal.

TB: Exactly. This type of leadership seems to me to be quite typical of the rudimen-tary forms of nonrepresentative democ-racy we have been talking about. All of this obviously clashes with the dominant logic, which is the logic of representation, of media, of elections. We can see the ten-sions at work there, but perhaps also some rudimentary kinds of solution. But always in a lot of pain, it would seem. . . . In the same way, I would like to have you react a bit to what certain sociologists and philos-ophers are saying. I’m thinking in particular of Alain Ehrenberg, or Bernard Stiegler in France. This form of problem that consists


CU

LTU

RA

L P

OL

ITIC

S2

21

in saying: when one speaks of individ-uation, at the present time, one has to perhaps put the negative prefix dis in front, as in “disindividuation.” One has to ask oneself, as Stiegler would say, if capitalism has lost its spirit. Therefore I would like to hear you react to this diagnosis that there is a sort of crisis of disindividuation, at the present time. First of all, are you familiar with these analyses, that of Stiegler in particular and how do you situate yourself in relation to them?

PV: I prefer to use the word ambivalence again. It’s not a very big step from an enormously intense individuation to its opposite, that is to say the disappearance of every trace of individuality. This ambiv-alence between anonymity and singu-larity is very instructive. Why? Precisely because anonymity and individuation show in a morbid way the fundamental relations between the preindividual and individuation. Hence, I wouldn’t talk about a well- defined tendency of disindividu-ation. I would talk about a sort of swing movement, so quick, so continuous, that it comes to resemble a form of paralysis. While what we have here is a shift from one pole to the other. . . .

TB: We come back, in fact, to what we said earlier about this notion of anxiety in Simondon’s work. He also talks about disindividuation, which he associates moreover with two forms of anxiety. There might be said to be a — let’s call it catastrophic — disindividuation where the individual loses himself in his nar-cissistic anxiety; and then on the other side, there is a positive disindividuation. Muriel Combes, for example, writes: “For Simondon, all psycho- social individua-tion, insofar as it has already- individuated beings as necessary elements, supposes

a relative disindividuation of individuals.” She continues: “In this disindividuation, the non- individuated potential contained in each of them is liberated, revealing itself to be available for a later individuation.” I believe that this swing movement that you evoke is a little bit like that. It is a little . . . at the same time . . . not the catastrophic side, but the fact that in order to individu-ate oneself further, one must first disindi-viduate, and so on.

PV: Yes, yes, it is a two- way ticket. One has to always return to the preindividual source of one’s subjectivity in order to find the forces, the energies for a new individ-uation. Collective individuation, further-more, is precisely that, that is to say, the possibility placed only outside of us, of individuating that which, in us, inside of us, is not psychically individualizable. There you have the central question, in my view: Is individuation an event accomplished once and for all, or rather something that keeps repeating cyclically during our exis-tence? I believe in the second alternative. Given that individuation is something very similar to anthropogenesis, or, at least, to ontogenesis, one could say that it is typical of human nature to repeat forever anew the process of anthropogenesis (or ontogenesis). So isn’t individuation this angst- ridden return to the primary scene, the cyclical repetition on the occasion of a crisis? When there is a biographical crisis or a social crisis, one must return to the dimension of the “we,” this preindividual dimension, and restart, repeat, reinstitute the individual dimension.

TB: On this topic, I wish to draw a parallel between what the psychoanalysts who are interested in children, or child psychia-trists, are saying, and what [André] Leroi- Gourhan said. The species individuated


ULT

UR

AL

PO

LIT

ICS

• 1

0:2

July

201

42

22

itself like a child, that is to say, by walking. It is when one walks that one frees up one’s hands, as Leroi- Gourhan hypoth-esizes. Hence, one could say that this notion of recapitulation is very important: not only does ontogenesis recapitulate phylogenesis, but singular — and also collective — individuation recapitulates both ontogenesis and phylogenesis. There might be said to be permanent cycles of recapitulation, which can always alternate, in fact, between the promise and the premise that you spoke about.

PV: [Laughter] Yes! The political problem would be rather that of conceiving the institutions where this dynamic would find a place. What institutions would permit the repetitive dynamic between the preindivid-ual and the individuated?

TB: It seems that there would be perhaps a contradiction in these terms. Because the institution, in general, seems unfavor-able to recapitulation, to the dynamic, even though we are in the age of reengi-neering. . . .

PV: Saussure, for instance, considered language the matrix of all other institu-tions. Hence, one can refer to fundamental institutions, so to speak, and broaden the notion of institution. . . .

TB: But it seems that one of the forms of institutional logic is to ensure its identical reproduction rather than to recapitulate itself. . . .

PV: Yes, that is true. But one could also say that the state of emergency, as we know, has become continuous today. But, as such, the state of emergency is very interesting for reflecting on the possible institutions of the multitude, or, if you like,

on the institutions that link the preindi-vidual and the individuated. The state of emergency, as such, is the place, the milieu, where there is no genuine differ-ence, let us say, between questions of law and questions of fact. And the absence of this difference is very dangerous today, as we see. As, in general, are institutions that treat their own rules, that is to say the questions of law, as always reversible, as always capable of returning to the state of the question of fact. This may suggest, I believe, something about the possible institutions in which the universal is not a promise but a premise.

TB: Obviously, listening to you, I have in mind what Giorgio Agamben, your com-patriot, wrote on these topics, and also his reference to the distinction Walter Ben-jamin makes with regard to violence and the role of violence in the law. It certainly seems that there is there a truly contem-porary interrogation of this question. There is no need to bring to mind the Patriot Act and Guantanamo and all that to understand what it is we are talking about. The state of emergency, I believe, finds its full signif-icance when we talk about these things today, the twenty- fourth of August 2006. To finish, there is one question to which you have already partially responded, but I would like to push things a little further: Is there a specific place for technology in your thinking about individuation, and, if so, what importance do you attach to the contemporary development of the biotech-nologies? Because when we talk about individuation, even if that has never been accepted as a criterion in the theoretical sense for philosophy, for common mortals, for a human individual, until very recently and perhaps for a few years still, it was quite simply the result of the reproductive act of one’s dad and one’s mom. It was


CU

LTU

RA

L P

OL

ITIC

S2

23

very simple, there wasn’t too much doubt possible. It would seem we are now enter-ing a period where this doubt is becoming possible and there are more and more tech-nological ways of making the artificial pro-duction of individuals conceivable. In this sense, could the contemporary evolution of the biotechnologies (parthenogenesis, clon-ing, the production of spermatozoids from the stem cells of male or female embryos) profoundly or essentially alter the general intellect that you’ve spoken of?

PV: I believe that this is an inseparable element of the contemporary general intel-lect. As opposed to what Marx said, today, the general intellect is no longer simply a set of machines. Rather, it is machines, of course, but also the living brains of human beings and their affects, their passions, the modalities of being in the world. All this, that is to say, human nature as common or preindividual element, can also be called general intellect. But if the general intellect is all of this, there is now a condition that is entirely particular, entirely historical, entirely contemporary. [Michel] Foucault spoke in this connection of an ontology of the present. This ontology of the present is precisely that human praxis has arrived at the point where it intervenes constantly on the conditions that make praxis human, and even make the human itself possible. Hence the problem is that human nature is not the decisive criterion of politics, but the object of politics, what is at stake in it. Chomsky, for example, who is admirable for many reasons, and in particular for his opposition to the government of the United States, thinks that one can deduce a decent politics from human nature. But he is mistaken. One cannot deduce a politics from the faculty of language. The problem is that in our age, human nature in all its aspects has become a raw material. . . . I

think that the techno- sciences truly consti-tute the principal challenge for those who want to think about the principle of individ-uation, because the techno- sciences, even if they present risks and horrible sides, and all that, nevertheless show the possibility of going beyond the opposition between the sciences of mind and the sciences of nature. The techno- sciences must, to be effective, take note of anthropological characteristics, must confront [Martin] Heidegger’s being- in- the- world. I know that there is the other side, the dark side of manipulation, but I would like the move-ment of individuated individuals to show a sympathy for technology and for more advanced, and no doubt risky, frontiers. One must therefore face up entirely to the extreme limit of contemporary technol-ogy. One must be a friend to technology, insofar as technology — and contemporary technology, in particular — is our preindivid-ual and hence the base and the source of the processes of individuation. As in [Fried-rich] Hölderlin’s old paradox, one can save oneself only when the danger is greatest.

TB: On this topic, to come back, as we close, to these Deleuzian and Foucauldian readings, the schema that seems now to be quite clearly accepted is that of a third age of capitalism that [Gilles] Deleuze called the societies of control, which is the successor to, but clearly does not put an end to, the disciplinary societies. To what extent are current technological sciences already in the process of preparing a new phase? Are we still wholly and solely in the societies of control that Deleuze was talking about? When one thinks about these biotechnologies that are going to be capable, to a certain extent, of eventually producing artificial individuals, is it still about control, or is it something else we’re faced with here?


ULT

UR

AL

PO

LIT

ICS

• 1

0:2

July

201

42

24

PV: I believe it is the latter. . . .

TB: I’ve defended this idea in my writ-ings, and called it, somewhat on a whim, “genetic capitalism.” A capitalism where the alienated would no longer be enslaved to the machine, as Foucault showed, or subjected to the machine, as Deleuze and [Félix] Guattari wrote, but potentially produced by the machine. . . .

PV: Produced by the machine. . . .

TB: And I believe, like you, that one cannot completely reject this production by say-ing, from a dogmatic position, “It is impos-sible, it is taboo,” but we should take note that it is arriving and that perhaps where there is the greatest danger, as you just said, there is perhaps also the pos sibility of doing something else. But we cannot see what yet. . . .

PV: One has to be faithful to the ancient, perhaps Aristotelian, definition, of man as a naturally artificial animal. So, where is the divide? The divide is that, in our age, this definition has become empirically evident. This definition was true, it goes without saying, for the ancient Greeks, as well. It has been true forever, but the essential thing is that this “forever” has become completely empirically real . . . embodied, real, evident, exhibited, concretely, today. . . . Which means only now. Once again, the link between the “forever” and the “only now.” . . . The human being has forever been a naturally artificial being.

TB: But this artifice took a lot of abstract forms, through language, through linguistic capacities. But when the body, through molecular biology, itself becomes an effect of language, an effect of code, there is something else happening.

PV: Yes, that is true, and this transition is essential, because the artificiality always consisted in the fact that the human being was an element related to the environment, and the author of that relation. This is strange, being both a related element and the author of the relation. It is a duplication on the basis of which [Helmuth] Plessner and the authors of German philosophical anthropology spoke about a duplicity of aspects of the human being. But now the problem is that this artificiality is applied to the very subjects that, traditionally, consti-tute the relation between men as biological organisms and the environment. There is, then, a sort of recursivity.

TB: Yes, perhaps in this recursivity the word culture recovers all its meanings. One was in the habit of saying “culture” only for artificial, abstract resources. And now one will be able to say “human culture” as the way one speaks about the “culture” — the growing — of cauliflowers. There is some-thing there that marks our age, all the same.

PV: Today, one can see with open eyes the biological character of culture and, if you like, vice versa, the cultural character of human biology. The concrete determina-tion of common nature that Duns Scotus talks about is precisely, today, the inter-lacing of biology and culture.

TB: Obviously, in the twentieth century, this topic was something demonic. Because one thinks of sociobiology and all those deviations that. . . .

PV: Nazism came out of that, too. German thought, great as it was, met its undoing, failed and ended in tragedy precisely because it recognized this connection in a sick, aberrant way. So yes, it was some-thing demonic, you are right.


CU

LTU

RA

L P

OL

ITIC

S2

25

TB: One last thing: I found, in Difference and Repetition, something we have per-haps already touched on today. Deleuze wrote in the 1960s: “With psychic systems the problem assumes a particular urgency, since it is by no means certain that either the ‘I’ or the ‘self’ falls within the domain of individuation.”

PV: [Laughter]

TB: “They are rather figures of differen-tiation. The ‘I’ forms the properly psychic determination of specifications, while the self forms the psychic organisation. The ‘I’ is the quality of human being as species.” And he continues a little further on: “That is why the individual in intensity finds its psychic image neither in the organization of the self nor in the determination of species of the I, but rather in the fractured I and the dissolved self.”

PV: [Laughter]

TB: “And in the correlation of the fractured ‘I’ with the dissolved self.” I have the

impression that we have said things today that resonated a lot with that. . . .

PV: Yes, that is extraordinary.

AcknowledgmentsThis interview was conducted by Thierry Bardini in Rome, on August 24, 2006. The translator wishes to thank him for sharing the transcript and for giving the permission of translation. Thanks go, as well, to Claire Simone Brault for her comments on an ear-lier draft of this text and to John Armitage and Ryan Bishop for their help in bringing this translation to completion.

Notes1. Multitudes is a French journal founded in 2000

by Yann Moulier- Boutang. It is largely inspired by the framework developed in the seminal work Empire, coauthored by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt (2001), and carries forward the political and philosophical ideas behind the Italian operaismo (“workerist” movement), with which Virno has been associated from the beginning.

Thierry Bardini is professor in the Department of Communication, University of Montreal.

He is the author of Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (2000) and Junkware (2011).

Briankle G. Chang is associate professor in the Department of Communication, University

of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of Deconstructing Communication: Subject, Representation, and Economies of Exchange (1996) and the coeditor of Philosophy of Communication (2012).

Srinivas Lankala is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication, University of

Massachusetts, Amherst.

Chris Turner lives in Birmingham, England. He was educated at the universities of Cambridge

and Sussex and has worked as a translator since 1984. His translation of Marc Augé’s No Fixed Abode was recently shortlisted for the Fiction Translation Prize of the French- American

Foundation.

on multitude and beyond: an interview with paolo virno

Documents