Antonio Negri. “The Labor of the Multitude and the Fabric of Biopolitics.” Trans. Sara Mayo, Peter Graefe and Mark Coté. Ed. Mark Coté. Mediations 23.2 (Spring 2008) 8-25. www.mediationsjournal.org/the-labor-of-the-multitude-and- the-fabric-of-biopolitics. The Labor of the Multitude and the Fabric of Biopolitics1 Antonio Negri Translated by Sara Mayo and Peter Graefe with Mark Coté Edited and Annotated by Mark Coté Editor’s Note I had the pleasure of driving Toni Negri to the McMaster University campus for his brief stay as the Hooker Distinguished Visiting Professor. As contin- gency would have it, we approached the city from the east, since I had picked him up at Brock University. Anyone familiar with Hamilton knows that this necessitates driving past the heart of “Steeltown.” Negri, in a driving practice true to his theoretical orientation, excitedly requested that we follow the route most proximal to the mills and smokestacks of Stelco and Dofasco. He asked many questions about the history of steelworkers’ labor struggles, the composition of the labor force, its level and form of organization, and the role of heavy industry in the Canadian economy. Negri’s keen interest in the conditions of a quintessentially material form of industrial production provides a necessary counterpoint to the strong poststructuralist inflection of his lecture. After all, his stated focus was on the subjective, the cultural, and the creative as key modalities of labor under globalization. These contrapuntal elements bring us to the heart of Negri’s project, wherein the conceptual deployments of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze act as articulated elements of his longstanding and ongoing com- mitment to Marxist theory and praxis. It is, of course, an open Marxism, iterable as necessitated by our historical moment. But then innovation, as Antonio Negri visited McMaster University as the Hooker Distinguished Visiting Professor in 2006. This lecture was delivered on 18 April 2006. [Ed.] 10 Antonio Negri The Labor of the Multitude 11 opposed to orthodoxy, has been a hallmark of Negri’s distinguished and it expresses is directed as much against the Italian Communist Party as the sometimes incendiary career. state and capital. After the murder of Italian prime minister Aldo Moro in In the lecture that follows, Negri asks two basic questions. First, how can 1978 by the Red Brigades, the state went on the offensive with its net we understand the organization of labor under neoliberal globalization, indiscriminately cast wide. Despite the lack of evidence, and the fact that where it has been anchored in the bios? Second, when and by which modali- Negri had been a vocal opponent of the Leninist-vanguardist Red Brigades, ties does life itself enter into the field of power and become a central issue? he was accused of being their theoretical wellspring. In answering these questions, he offers an exciting reconceptualization of He quickly fled to Paris, and while in exile there was invited by Louis power (pace Foucault) that provides a unique and provocative lens through Althusser to deliver a series of lectures at the prestigious École Normale which to examine globalization in relation to the human condition. The Supérieure, eventually transcribed as Marx Beyond Marx.3 Based on the purpose of this brief introduction will therefore be both to contextualize the Grundrisse, the lectures evinced not the despair of post-insurrectionary work of Negri and to introduce key concepts used in the lecture, namely failure but a liberatory focus on making Marx more adequate to a historical biopower-biopolitics and the crisis of measure. moment in which post-Fordism was beginning to take flight through neolib- Negri may be most familiar to some through his scholar-as-celebrity eral globalization. As such, it signaled an expanded theoretical perspective status achieved with the massive success of Empire.1 In Italy, however, he that would lead Negri increasingly to Foucault, Deleuze, and the conceptual has been producing important work since the 1960s. The autonomist Marxist cornerstones of his Hooker lecture, which follows. tradition from which Negri emerged — historically called operaismo Negri identified a “crisis of measure” in the Marxist labor theory of value (workerism) in Italian — was distinguished by turning orthodox Marxism as both an emergent characteristic of global capital and a new path for radical “on its head,” as it were. Its fundamental conceptual innovation was to political, social, and economic change. A key factor in the breakdown of a reverse the dynamic of labor-capital power relations. Rather than beginning simple temporal measure of the productivity of labor is the radical transfor- with capital’s domination over labor, the autonomists — via Mario Tronti in mation of the production process though information and communication the early 1960s — began with the struggles of labor. In short, this new model technology. This facilitates the rise of “immaterial labor” and the “general understood capitalist power as having a reactive dynamic, only ever respond- intellect” as the dominant productive forces, as opposed to unmediated ing to the potential, the practices, and the struggles of labor. Thus capitalist material labor. development proceeds through the rearticulation of existing social and What is innovative about the interpretation by Negri and other autono- productive forms of labor. Under such a model, questions about the composi- mists is that this is primarily a subjective process — hence the increasingly tion of labor are of preeminent importance, particularly as they can reveal the poststructuralist trajectory. Marx, in the Grundrisse, posited “general weakest points of capitalist control. intellect” as accumulating in the fixed capital of machinery. However, the Negri attained another kind of prominence in the 1970s. At that time, the “subjective” reading of the autonomists situates this value in new laboring Left in Italy was certainly the largest and most febrile in Europe.2 It was also subjectivities, the technical, cultural, and linguistic knowledge that makes polyvalent, active both within representative democracy and on an extrapar- our high-tech economy possible. Such subjectivities become an immediate liamentary level. Throughout the 1970s, the Eurocommunism of Enrico productive force. And, as autonomist Paolo Virno notes, “They are not units Berlinguer’s Italian Communist Party was tantalizingly close to gaining of measure, but rather are the measureless presupposition of heterogeneous power, falling only four percent short of plurality behind the ruling Christian operative possibilities.”4 The temporal disjunction provocatively situates Democrats in 1976. The Party’s institutional successes created a wider swath immaterial labor beyond the commodity form, signaling a “scissor-like for more critical and open Left politics. Negri was a preeminent part of this widening” of the gap between wage labor/exchange value and this new tradition, long active in the more radical extraparliamentary Left, both as a subjective productive force. revolutionary militant and as professor and head of the Institute of Political For Negri, such a force is diffused — albeit asymmetrically — in an in- Science Department of the University of Padova. Clashes grew more con- dividuated manner across society, and it expresses the “global potentiality stant, not only between the variegated radical Left and the Italian state but which has within it that generalized social knowledge which is now an with the Italian Communist Party as well. Indeed, Negri’s work from that essential condition of production.”5 In short, this new “subjective” condition time cannot be properly understood without recognizing that the antagonism of labor is the liberatory potential of what Negri would later call the “multi- 12 Antonio Negri The Labor of the Multitude 13 tude.” Thus inscribed in this new power dynamic is the possibility of labor The Labor of the Multitude and the Fabric of Biopolitics being not only antagonistic to capital but autonomous from — as opposed to within — capital. I would like to discuss the problem of the anchoring of the organization of Foucault’s biopower offers a new conceptual foundation. Here Negri labor — and of the new postmodern political field which results — in the helps make visible the strong lines of affinity between Foucault (and bios. We will see in a moment when and according to which modalities life Deleuze) and autonomist Marxism that have been largely overlooked. What enters into the field of power and becomes an essential issue. is taken from Foucault is a thoroughly reconfigured understanding of power. Let’s take as a starting point the Foucauldian definition of biopolitics. What it enables us to see with greater precision is the intertwining of life and The term “biopolitics” indicates the manner in which power transforms itself power in myriad productive formations. Foucault identified biopower as a in a certain period so it can govern not only individuals through a certain form emergent since the end of the eighteenth century in the wake of the number of disciplinary procedures but also the set of living things constituted inadequacies of sovereign and disciplinary power. This is a productive form as “populations.” Biopolitics (through local biopowers) takes control of the of power relations that “manages” populations (not individual bodies) in a management of health, hygiene, diet, fertility, sexuality, etcetera, as each of “preventive fashion” to maximize their productivity as opposed to, say, these different fields of intervention have become political issues. Biopolitics punishing them after the fact as with sovereign power (Foucault offers sexual thus comes to be involved, slowly but surely, in all aspects of life, which health and early epidemiology as initial examples). As Foucault notes, later become the sites for deploying the policies of the welfare state: its “biopower uses populations like a machine for production, for the production development is in effect entirely taken up with the aim of a better manage- of wealth, goods, and other individuals.”6 ment of the labor force.