Time for Revolution

303 Pages·2004·8.1 MB·English

by  Antonio Negri

Time fo r Revolution explores the burning
issue of our times: is there still a place for
resistance in a society utterly subsumed by
capitalism?
Written in prison two decades apart, these
two essays reflect Antonio Negri’s abiding
interest in the philosophy of time and
resistance. The first essay traces the fracture
lines which force capitalist society into
perpetual crisis. The second, written
immediately after the global bestseller,
Empire, develops the two key concepts of
empire and multitude.
Time fo r Revolution illuminates the course
of Negri’s thinking from the 1980s to Empire
and beyond.
p r a i s e f o r E m p i r e
4How often can it happen that a book is swept
o ff the shelves until you can't fin d a copy in
New York for love nor m oney?' 0 It S E It V E It
‘ Whether presenting new concepts - like
Empire and multitude - or urging revolution,
it brims with confidence in its ideas.'
N ew Y ork T imes
\ . . a philosophical vision that some have
greeted as the “next big thing" in the field oj
the humanities.' S u n d a y Tim es
‘Empire has com e as close to becom ing an
international best seller as a book dense with
references to Spinoza, Marx and Deleuze is
likely to g e l . . . it has become a cult book
am ong the anti-globalization protest
movement, praised from Berkeley and Buenos
Aires to London and Paris.'
N ew Y oiik R e v i e w of R o o k s
Time f o r Revolution
ANTONIO NEGRI
Translated by Matteo Mandarini
T FILOZOFSKI FAKULTET«
MUMANISTIČKF I DtaJSTVENč JN*«BSTl
p Q B C B - Đu <E SALAJA BROJ t
KnJUnioa Fiioztfijskaia
Seminar« u ^.agrsby
Sign.
Inv. br.
coritinuum
• W W N E W YORK • L O N D O N
Continuum
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London, SEl 7NX
370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017-6303
© Antonio Negri, 2003
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system,
without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
La consituzione del tempo © Manifestolibri 1997
Kairds, Alma Venus, Multido © Manifestolibri 2000
English translation © Continuum 2003
Introduction and editorial © Continuum 2003
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 0-8264-3931-5 (hardback)
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Typeset in Adobe Garamond by RefineCarch Limited
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
MPG Books Ltd. Bodmin, Cornwall
Contents
Acknowledgements
Translator’s introduction
The Constitution of Time .. , , n
filozofski
Preamble , huwawsi'^' • Et-CJ
■<1 u 6 R B _ , • j-. vr '
1 First Displacement: the time of subsumed being
1.1 Time-as-measure and productive time
1.2 Tautology and composition
1.3 An Umwelt of antagonism
1.4 Displacement, hysteresis, asymmetry,
innovation
2 First Construction: collective time A
2.1 Ascesis and ecstasy: analytic of circulation
3 First Construction: collective time B
3.1 Crisis: towards a phenomenology of collective
praxis
4 Second Construction: productive time A
4.1 Money, value, nomenclature: between
timepiece and war
4.2 Energy: evanescence of space
5 Second Construction: productive time B
5.1 Refusal of work and productive co-operation
5.2 Internal time and external time
6 Third Construction: constitutive time A
6.1 The hard time of the State: information and
legitimation
IV CONTENTS
7 Third Construction: constitutive time B 91
7.1 Time of class struggle: the new institutionality 91
7.2 Pluralism and dualism: on the logical matrices 97
7.3 The body and the time of constitution 102
8 Second Displacement: the time of the revolution W 107
8.1 The project and death: now-time {Jetzt-Zeit) 107
8.2 Endogenous processes and exogenous
processes: analytic and catastrophe 113
9 Third Displacement: the time of the revolution Y 120
9.1 The time machine 120
9.2 Constitution and class struggle 122
Afterword 127
Kairds, Alma Venus, Multitudo
Introduction 139
Kairos 147
Prolegomena 147
The common name 147
The immeasurable 159
The materialist field 1^9
Alma Venus 1 ® ^
Prolegomena 1 ® ^
Tt 181
1 he common
Poverty ^
Love 2°9
Multitudo 22^
Prolegomena 22^
Politics 22^
Living labour 2^5
The decision 248
262
Notes
Bibliography 290
Acknowledgements
I would like to start by thanking Tristan Palmer and Rowan Wilson at
Continuum for their patience and assistance throughout this project. 1
have also been fortunate to have had the encouragement of Michael
Hardt, whose skills as a reader have been invaluable. I am indebted
to Stephen Houlgate for tracing a reference to Hegel from a single
(mistranslated) word. Susan and Francesco Mandarini provided
indispensable support and advice from the beginning to the end of this
project - it could not have happened without them. Thanks to Juliet
Rufford for showing extraordinary patience and perseverance with my
syntax and me. The introduction is a good deal less opaque thanks to
her hard work. And I would also like to thank Eliot Albert, Tariq
Goddard and Alberto Toscano for many hours of debate that, in one
way or another, found their way into this book. Alberto Toscano pro­
vided typically incisive comments on several drafts of this introduction
and suggestions for the notes to the translations themselves.
Finally, I am most grateful to Antonio Negri for suggesting that I
bring together these two texts in the first place. I have gained a great
deal from reading, translating and writing about his work but even
more from his intellectual generosity and commitment.
Matteo Mandarini
Translator’s introduction
Labour is the living, form-giving fire; it is the transitoriness of
things, their temporality, as their formation by living time.
(Karl Marx, Grundrisse)
The two texts by Antonio Negri, translated into English and brought
together here for the first time, display a formidable capacity for com­
pression. The Constitution o f Time (1981) - originally published as the
final chapter of the collection of essays Macchina tempo (Negri 1982a),
covering the period 1976—81 - arguably represents the high point of
the theoretical and practical work carried out over the course of a
decade or more by Antonio Negri and his comrades and collaborators,
while it also exhibits the productive aporias,1 the resolution of which
would occupy Negri over the next decade. Kairbs, Alma Venus, Multi-
tudo (2000a), Negri’s latest book, matches the earlier work in terms of
its force of concentration, drawing together in a single, dense text the
results of the work that followed The Constitution o f Time in the 1980s
and 1990s. Kairbs, Alma Venus, Multitudo was written after Negri’s
work on Empire was finished, yet it represents a deepening of the
conceptual assemblage provided in the latter collaborative work.
Antonio Negri’s writings are notoriously difficult in the Italian, and
they become doubly so for a reader who is largely unacquainted with
the debates of Operaismo.2 The situation has not been helped by the
almost complete self-censorship of the Italian publishing world follow­
ing the suppression of il Movimento and the ‘counter-revolution’ of the
1980s, which saw many of the writings of some of the major theorists
of the 1970s (including those of Negri) disappear from circulation.3
Raniero Panzieri’s Lotte Operaie Nello Sviluppo Capitalistico (1976b)
and extracts from Mario Tronti’s seminal Operai e Capitale (1966) were
translated into English, if only in relatively obscure journals and collec­
tions, in the late 1970s and early 1980s,4 but their isolation from il
Movimento (many of whose members were either in prison or exile)
meant that they were never able to become components of a broader
2
TIME FOR REVOLUTION
international debate and social movement. In recent years, a number of
thinkers have begun to remedy this situation.5 But the works they have
produced, and even Empire itself, would have failed to make the impact
that they have made outside the academy had their publication not
intersected with the emerging, global subjectivities of what, in Italy, has
become known as IIpopolo di Seattle and the new cycle of struggles that
has - so far - led from the American city to Genoa, Barcelona and Florence.
For The Constitution o f Time, I have provided some further informa­
tion for the reader (mainly drawn from Negri’s own writings) in the
translator’s notes. In the case of Kairds, Alma Venus, Multitudo, I have
let what is a remarkably self-sufficient text speak largely for itself. Its
development is driven by an autonomous logic, a cumulative com­
position, and exhibits constant feedback-effects that perpetually
unground and refound it. From first, second, third ... to nth founda­
tion. Too many notes would only dislocate the consistency of the
composition, as would too many external references. Conversely, The
Constitution o f Time is heavily interspersed with citations and refer­
ences. While in prison Antonio Negri used notebooks to jot these down
from the limited number of books he was allowed to have at any one
time. As he recalled in his 1997 Introduction (reprinted here as an
Afterword), many of these notebooks were ‘destroyed in the piss and
fire of the repressors, for no other reason than that dictated by the
revenge of a rabble of cowardly and ignorant prison guards’. Despite his
and my best efforts, it has been impossible to track some of these
references down. The Bibliography is thus reconstructed almost
entirely from memory and guesswork.
In 1981 Antonio Negri had been in prison for almost two years
pending trial. He would remain there for another two before his election
as Radical Party member to parliament and, following the subsequent
Chamber of Deputies’ vote to rescind his parliamentary immunity, his
flight into exile in Paris. Perhaps these particular circumstances, in which
‘re-education to virtue is reached through idleness (Kairds) as Negri
would say with some irony when he once again found himself two years
into an Italian prison sentence (1999),6 were those most conducive to
taking stock of the theoretical and practical work accomplished over the
preceding years. Two different prisons; two different books.
But it is not just the circumstances of composition that link these
translator’s introduction 3
texts together. Nor is it simply the recapitulative force, the extraordinary
compression and the desire to make sense of the intense years that
preceded, common to both these texts, that make the present volume
more than an arbitrary collection. It provides indispensable material for
understanding the development of Negri’s thought - not only that
carried out in his years of exile, but also the collaborative work with
Michael Hardt - and for grasping the new possibilities for collective
action in the face of the new Imperial forms of capitalist accumulation,
which represent the abiding concern of Negri’s theoretical labour.
Taken together, then, the texts elucidate the course of Negri’s thinking
from Marx Beyond Marx (1979) to Empire (2000), from proletarian
self-valorization to the constellations of co-operating multitudes. The
red thread that links the two, as the title for this collection suggests, is
that of temporality.
/
In order to situate the two texts translated here a brief account of
Empire is in order. The widely debated theoretical synthesis that Empire
represents has been able to ‘tap into’ and give rational expression to the
optimism expressed in the new age of militancy that emerged in the
mid-1990s - thus bringing to a welcome conclusion the short-lived
triumphalism of the champions of the ‘end of history’. Taking up again
some of the founding principles of Operaismo, Hardt and Negri argue
that during the last quarter of the twentieth century, capital has been
forced to restructure in order to break the workers’ and anti-colonial
struggles that had shattered its previous regime of accumulation.
Restructuring followed upon struggle. As Hardt and Negri put it in
their account of the power of the multitude — the antagonistic subject
of‘Empire’ - when the ‘action of Empire is effective, this is due not to
its own force but to the fact that it is driven by the rebound from the
resistance of the multitude against imperial power’ (Hardt and Negri
2000, p. 360). Thus, the much vaunted triumph of capital that global­
ization is supposed to embody is not a sign of the health and creativity
of capital but rather the effect of struggles that could no longer be
regulated within the nation state. Capital’s response to such struggles