Paolo Virno. Photo: Nora Parcu.
Children of a long counterrevolution, many of us were taught by the defeated.
One of those teachers, Paolo Virno, left us last month. Virno always stressed that defeat rather than failure—with its loyal sidekicks, error and guilt—was the right category through which to gaze back on the political experience of Italy’s “red years.” For him, that defeat had meant—as it did for thousands of others caught in the capacious nets of emergency anti-terrorism decrees—stints in prison in the late 1970s and early 1980s, followed by a not-untypical itinerary through the motley worlds of intellectual labor—editing, journalism, writing scripts for cartoon strips, even poker (among the sources for his abiding attention to play and virtuosity as features of contemporary work).
Having graduated in philosophy in 1977 with a thesis on the critiques of epistemology and political economy in Theodor W. Adorno and written his first book of philosophy, Convention and Materialism (1986; 2nd ed. 2011; Eng. trans. 2021), while an enemy of the state, Virno only began teaching philosophy at the university in his forties. Before and after entering, with irony, disenchantment, and pedagogical passion, the academic profession, Virno was the editor of a slew of formidable reviews and magazines, experimental and polemical worksites of collective thought: Linea di condotta (1975), Metropoli (1979–81), Luogo comune (1990–93), DeriveApprodi (1992–2005), Forme di vita (2003–7).
From the 1990s until his death, he published over a dozen books, which together comprise a remarkably consistent and multifaceted research program in what he came to term “linguistic anthropology.” While the texts, ranging from The Idea of World (1994; rev. ed. 2015; Eng. trans. by L. Chiesa, 2022) to Essay on Negation (2013; Eng. trans. by L. Chiesa, 2018), When the Word Becomes Flesh (2003; Eng. trans. by G. Mecchia, 2015) to Avere (Having, 2020), are books of philosophy that require no political partisanship for their appreciation, it is equally true that the motivations that drew Virno towards his incisive and searching inquiries into the nexus of language and human nature were profoundly entangled with both the revolution he threw himself into and the counterrevolution that came in its wake.
To understand the one, we have to understand the other. By way of guidance, we could do worse than return to two texts translated in an epoch-making English-language collection, Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (1996), that Virno edited alongside Michael Hardt: the collective text by political prisoners from Potere Operaio, “Do You Remember Revolution?,” and Virno’s own pendant, “Do You Remember Counterrevolution?” For Virno, the transformative and insurrectionary wave that shook Italy during the “red decade” that went from the late sixties to the late seventies amounted to a collective effort to overthrow capital not at its margins, or by leveraging its unevenness, but from within its strongest links. Inverting the famous formula from the young, pre-carceral Gramsci, this was a revolution not against, but with, Das Kapital—to abolish wage labor and the capitalist state at their most advanced and totalizing. The stakes were not the depths of misery but the wealth and complexity of needs that capitalism simultaneously elicited and blocked.
Hence Virno’s frequent reminder that his communism was not of the “left,” if by the latter we understand a tradition—Jacobin as well as social democratic or Third Internationalist—anchored in the standpoint of labor and aiming at a conquest of the state. In the trajectory from operaismo to autonomia and beyond, Virno discerned a desire to refuse the obsolescent frame of subordinated wage labor and to reconstruct a “non-state public sphere” while opening up to the multiplicity and singularity of needs, practices, and desires that swarmed outside of the measure of capital and the strictures of the sovereign nation-state. The wager was that the subversive push which culminated in the so-called movement of 1977 in Italy was not the last hurrah of the workers’ movement but the beginning, however incomplete and unsuccessful, of a different revolutionary perspective. After decades of traditional Marxist polemics against workerist and autonomist heresies, and without disavowing the practical or theoretical limitations of those movements, it is appropriate to recall that this generation of communist activists who said farewell to the centrality of the industrial working class did so after years of relentless, militant organizing at factories, cutting their teeth on pay struggles, battles over health and safety, wildcat strikes, occupations, and so on. Theirs was a lived experience of the mutations in the political and technical composition of the class, born from workplace organizing and struggle—which their critics are often blessedly unblemished by—not a feckless and metaphysical abandonment of value theory.
For Virno, the capitalist counterrevolution that shadowed and then quashed the insurgencies of the seventies—and which came to be referred to by shorthand as “neoliberalism,” “post-Fordism,” and “postmodernism,” inter alia—was not a mere restoration, but an inverted revolution. In many ways it assumed the claims and impetus of the subversive wave—not least the undermining of salaried labor as a social norm—but it did so for the sake of an even more unfettered pattern of capitalist domination. Likewise, the new fascism was not a regurgitation of the murderous pathology of Fordism and its crises, but “the terrifying ‘double,’ of the most radical instances of freedom and community that arise in the crisis of the labor-based society” (“Theses on the New European Fascism,” 1993). Crucially—and here lies the link between counterrevolution and linguistic anthropology—capital’s own flight from the factory, its effort to emancipate itself from the working class, meant that the process of production and the extraction of surplus value were increasingly predicated on the profitable mobilization—as Virno wrote in his 2011 preface to Convention and Materialism—of “some invariant traits of our species: the language faculty, the flexibility that is linked to the lack of a rigidly defined environment, familiarity with the possible and the unpredictable, etc.” This capitalization of human nature, so to speak—and not any specific sociological figure of immaterial labor or cognitive capitalism—is one of the crucial problems that Virno’s philosophy explores, even or sometimes especially when it is stripped of any overt social or political referent.
What does it mean that “only now”—when capital has finally attained its concept, as he put it, Hegelian tongue firmly planted in Marxist cheek—is the “always already” of our species being pushed into the political and economic foreground? Why has meta-history—those traits that link our biological underdetermination, our neoteny, with our social overdevelopment—become a directly historical and thus political issue? According to Virno, prior to the capitalist counterrevolution, our capacities, which is to say our “biological invariant” (our “non-specialization, neoteny, lack of a univocal environment,” as he put it in When the Word Becomes Flesh), only came to the fore in the midst of catastrophic anomalies, social states of exception—that is, when the immunizing and compensatory pseudo-environments furnished by culture faltered or collapsed. The destruction of these pseudo-environments by the icy calculations of advanced capitalism brings our indefinite species-being, our generic essence, ever more to the fore: “Amorphous potentiality, i.e. the chronic persistence of infantile characteristics, does not threateningly emerge in the midst of a crisis, but pervades every aspect of the most trite routine.” And it is precisely in this situation, where there is a premium on “flexible” capacities, that abstract, conventional norms (or controls) proliferate and become ever more plastic, as well as more insidious. There is a clear isomorphy here with the argument made by Marx in the Grundrisse regarding both labor and money: “This very simple category … makes a historic appearance in its full intensity only in the most developed conditions of society … When it is economically conceived in this simplicity, ‘labour’ is as modern a category as are the relations which create this simple abstraction.”
From his first book to his final works, Virno’s concern lay with articulating a materialism that could treat the a priori of experience (collective and individual experience, or to borrow from an author dear to him, Gilbert Simondon, “transindividual” experience) not as an intangible and immutable structure but as a kind of “raw material [materia prima], developing (pleasurable or painful) sensation as well as social communication on the level [sul piano] of ‘transcendental conditions,’ rather than under them” (Convention and Materialism). The possible, the potential, the universal, the impersonal, the abstract—these were categories that, in keeping with the idea that species-being (or, for the neoliberals, “human capital”) was a direct stake of political and class struggle, had to be given a materialist cast. From the mid-nineties onwards, and especially in the 2000s, when he built a community of like-minded researchers around the journal Forme di vita, this materialism of the (historical and metahistorical) a priori increasingly took the form of a naturalist understanding of the human animal as a loquacious primate—albeit one sensitive to the profoundly ambivalent and underdetermined, dangerous and perfectible, character of a human nature for which necessity is contingent and contingency is necessary. This was a materialism for a phase of protracted crisis—for, as Virno recalled, it was in moments of danger that one is impelled to widen one’s scope and tackle the basic logical and ethical problems of human life.
Just as the dominant line in the socialist and workers’ movement was for Virno unusable to fashion a communism among the twinned ruins of the wage form and the warfare-welfare nation-state, a truly contemporary materialism had to compose its tradition from heterogenous, seemingly incompatible, and sometimes fissile sources. In a remarkable and revealing short essay from 1998, “The Tradition of Critical Thought,” he offered this inventory, dating the tradition from 1960 (the year which many Italian workerists identified as the beginning of the parabola of class struggle that would peak in the “hot autumn” of 1969). It included the operaismo of Quaderni rossi and its offshoots; Guy Debord’s preemptive situationist critique of postmodernity in Society of the Spectacle; Foucault’s “power-knowledge” and Deleuze-Guattari’s “molecular revolution”; the writings of Hans-Jürgen Krahl on mass intellectual labor; the historical work of the journal Primo Maggio; and Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s analysis of real abstraction, science, and knowledge under capitalism. (I believe it was Virno’s nod to this latter minor figure in the nebula of the Frankfurt School that originally led me to Intellectual and Manual Labour.) For Virno, this mutant “Marxist and therefore not ‘Left-wing’” patchwork was catalysed by the movement of ’77 and the need to rethink the antagonism against capital from within the emergence of “figures of non-industrial, intellectual, intermittent, autonomous labour.” It meant taking distance from the Gramscian-Togliattian and “Third-Worldist” tendencies in the Italian left. (This did not stop Virno from writing some wonderful pages on the relevance of Fanon to metropolitan struggles in the heartlands of capitalism, while the Sardinian communist leader’s reflections on language and intellectuality could certainly be profitably revisited from the perspective of Virno’s own “linguistic anthropology.”)
But this political tradition of critical theory was to be accompanied by the genealogy of a sui generis if not quite “subterranean” materialist tradition—the one, it might be noted, which animated many of Virno’s philosophical works over the past three decades, which were also increasingly in irreverently faithful dialogue with Plato and Aristotle, reread in our own “moment of danger.” This materialist genealogy included the Marxist philosopher Galvano della Volpe’s “logic of the heterogeneous,” as a tool to think the breaks between sensible experience and the linguistic intellect; the anthropologist Ernesto de Martino’s study of “cultural apocalypses” and the ritual disposition of the human animal (it was while translating Virno that I discovered the formidable unfinished research program that is de Martino’s The End of the World); Sebastiano Timpanaro’s effort to articulate a thinking of revolution that would be fully naturalist and materialist; and the entire skein of philosophical anthropologists from Herder to Gehlen who explored the nature of the human as indefinite, the potential animal. But above all, the materialist branch of Virno’s genealogy was a linguistic one, comprising those authors “who have identified in verbal language the authentic biological hallmark of our species” (from Saussure to Benveniste, Wittgenstein to Leroi-Gourhan). Whether Marxist, linguistic, or anthropological (or rather, as Marxist, linguistic, and anthropological), materialism was anchored in the idea that the genesis of theory is not theoretical. Like its political branch, this one—by no means unanimously on the “left,” nor indeed communist—gained its pertinence and urgency from the transformations in capital and the struggles against it, from the phenomenology of contemporary labor and the emotional tonalities (and psychopathologies) of everyday life. “Only now” was its way of bringing the “always already” to the fore of such moment and consequence.
But Virno’s materialism also had a profoundly ethical (not moral) meaning. He liked to recall Adorno’s observation that materialism was not just bodily, but that it stubbornly insisted—to the disgust or consternation of censorious idealists—on sensuous pleasures and on death. In an article from 1988, during his stretch as the editor of the cultural pages of the independent communist newspaper Il manifesto (his writings from this period were collected in Negli anni del nostro scontento: Diario delle controrivoluzione, 2022), Virno wrote that materialism’s theme of choice is “the shadow that the body casts on thought, the place that the sensuous plays in the abstraction that would like to erase it. The remembrance of the corpse, the primacy of the senses, the questioning after happiness”—that, and not metaphysical speculation or a scientific ontology, was the beating core of the materialist tradition. The plebeian nobility of materialism lay in its theatrical and polemical settling of accounts against the idealist tradition—reintroducing the body undone by death into the antiseptic sites of logic and knowledge in order all the better to defend “the hedonistic aspiration of the living and sentient body.” But for Virno, in a world forged by the immense accumulation of commodities and of spectacles, the scandalous struggle for the sensuous and suffering body, for the aspiration to happiness and the unrepeatable singularity of the living—and thus of the dying—had to confront the profoundly abstracted and dislocated character of contemporary experience, the fragmentation or precariousness of settled communities, habits, worldviews, identities, and environments, but also the productive character of codes, conventions, algorithms, impersonal rules, and sign systems. Unrepeatability, individuality, singularity, sensation, pleasure—yes, but as what comes after the rich totality of many determinations and relations woven by capital’s real abstractions.
It was on this background of abstraction and conventions, codes and algorithms, uprootedness and disenchantment, of the “bad new” and not the “good old things,” that for Virno we needed to return to the preoccupations of ancient materialism, not just pleasure and death, but friendship and infancy.
In his remarkable, penultimate book, Avere (Having), Virno writes of the friend (a philosophical figure which, contra Schmitt, is emphatically not the symmetrical counterpart of the enemy, having no connection to state sovereignty) as the double of that speaking primate which—characterised by having but not being its own essence, traits, and capacities—is marked by a fundamental duality. Friendship is a matter of “spirit,” materialistically understood as that domain which is on the hither side of interiority and exteriority so that “friendship exhibits the intimate physiognomy of what is most public and, inversely, the public tenor of every touching intimacy” (something that Virno made movingly evident in his own obituaries for friends and comrades Lucio Castellano, Luciano Ferrari Bravo, Rossana Rossanda, and others).
If friendship is rooted deep in the “conditions that make the individual human mind superpersonal,” then a meditation on childhood or infancy, as Virno observed in a wonderful short essay from Luogo Comune (“Il linguaggio in mezzo al guado” [Language in mid-stream], 1991), has become even more indispensable for a materialist philosophy today, when capitalism exploits the absence of settled habits, the plasticity of our cognition, and the propensity for play. As he remarked, in words that resonate with even greater critical urgency today:
The society of generalized communication, in which work manifests an essentially linguistic disposition, must be interrogated starting from the experience of those who, not endowed with speech, are coming into language. The current form of technics, namely that artificial intelligence which aims to objectivate cognitive processes and self-reflection, can be better understood and more radically criticized if contrasted with the child’s learning of the world.
From that vantage, “mature” capitalist society appears not as a childlike arena for playful repetition and the enjoyment of what is both singular and selfsame, but forges a “puerile” world marked by the commodity’s compulsion to repeat, generating an endless multiplicity of pseudo-environments while stifling the child’s ability to make and unmake worlds. Infancy is stifled by infantilization, the intelligence of artifice by artificial intelligence. For Virno, it was politically imperative to renew the infant or childlike feeling for language as something we attain to, to language as a faculty. And he did this with irreverent curiosity, polemical irony, acute insight, and inventiveness in his philosophical texts, not least through an inimitable prose style that combined combative clarity and lexical playfulness—a million miles away from the ponderous piety of so much philosophical writing.
A Marxist and materialist philosopher that I don’t think Virno felt any kinship for, Louis Althusser, once observed that “our age threatens one day to appear in the history of human culture as marked by the most dramatic and difficult trial of all, the discovery of and training in the meaning of the ‘simplest’ acts of existence: seeing, listening, speaking, reading.” Virno reinvented and revitalised materialism for our late-capitalist society by asking after the “simplest” acts as they turned into the crucial stakes of a society whose productive forces and relations appear marked by the greatest complexity, abstraction, and volatility—a predicament perhaps not unrelated to Brecht’s poetic definition of communism: “It’s the simple thing / That’s hard to do.”
As the bad new gets worse, so we continue to weave and reweave the living tradition of materialism, in politics as in philosophy. In the unrepeatable singularity of his thought and character, in his praxis of militancy as collective intellectual production, in showing how to live as a communist in counterrevolutionary times, Paolo Virno is now part of that tradition.
