Art and Multitude Nine letters on art, followed by Metamorphoses: Art and immaterial labour ANTONIO NEGRI ‘Translated by Ed Emery polityCONTENTS Editor's Note vi Author's Introduction vii Nine Letters on Art 1 Letter to Gianmarco on the Abstract 3 Letter to Carlo on the Postmodern 13 Letter to Giorgio on the Sublime 22 Letter to Manfredo on Collective Work 33 Letter to Massimo on Beauty 44 Letter to Nanni on Constructing 53 Letter to Silvano on the Event 64 Letter to Ratil on the Body 76 Letter to Marie-Magdeleine on the Biopolitical 89 Postscript 99 Metamorphoses: Art and Immaterial Labour 101EDITOR'S NOTE In December 1988 Antonio Negri chose the form of letters to friends in order to develop his ideas about the nature of art in postmodernity. The first seven letters were published in Italian in 1990 under the title Arte ¢ multitudo. In 1999 and 2001 he added new letters which take account of the development of his thinking. A speech given in January 2008, entitled Meta- morphoses, develops this line of thought and serves as a postscript to the present edition. viAUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION May 2004 How might one decipher the codes governing the syntax of the letters gathered under the title Art et multitude, written in 1988, which are being published today in a new edition? The problem I was posing myself at the time was how to get out of a perception of society which saw it as entirely compressed by the capitalist mode of produc- tion. The society around me seemed like an enormous piling up of commodities, a piling up of abstract values which money and the mechanisms of the financial world were rendering interchangeable: a capitalist world stamped with unilateralism, in which tensions were as good as eliminated. In that world I could no longer find anything natural — I mean pre-industrial and not manu- factured. Marxism distinguishes the exchange value of commodities from their use value. Of this use value — which, despite the systems of domination and the methods of exploitation, also valorized exchange — I no longer found the slightest trace. The world had become completely reified and abstract. What meaning could art viiAUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION have in such a situation? Within this reality, what could be the processes of artistic production, of alternative creation, of reinvention of the real? This perception was not simply philosophical, it was also political. Since | was also working on Leopardi at that time, I remembered what the criticism of realities around him revealed to this great Italian poet of the first half of the nineteenth century: a world which was becoming relentlessly more abstract, a world which he described as ‘statistic’, a world which annulled passions, that is, the only forces which render life worth living. So what was there to be said about the world which surrounded me, which sur- rounded all of us, in the course of the 1980s, after the defeat of the revolutionary movement of the 1970s, in the midst of the neoliberal restoration and the political extension of capitalism to all terrains of production and to all spaces of the globe! What am I to say of this uni- verse of market institutions which were closing their grip on us, as if to suffocate us, from the most local level to the most global, stripping life and imagination of every trace of innovation and solidarity? So this was the philo- sophical theme (but above all political) which was giving me food for thought at that time. I was perfectly aware that art, too, belonged to that world. If the world which surrounded me was thoroughly saturated, so to speak, by industrial production, and if everything I touched, for viiiAuthor’ Introduction all its seeming natural and concrete, was in reality manufactured and abstract, art could only move within that same horizon. If the capitalist mode of production no longer offered an ‘outside’, one could only grasp and consider artistic activity in its ‘insideness’. It was stating the obvious to say that art had moved from being figurative to being abstract. On the other hand, the artistic mode of production was flattening out and aping the capitalist mode of production (through arti- sanal practices and a reified imagination). No longer were there natural models for one to refer to, or pictures to be taken: henceforth representing meant producing, and nature could only be given in a form already modified, as a production of monsters (in other words, of things simultaneously strange and miraculous), additions, augmentations, prostheses of nature and of its figures, hybridizations, proliferations, perfor- mances .. . Henceforth art belonged within an undif- ferentiated multiplicity of social constructions and communication, and it was part and parcel of the world of commodities into which we had all been plunged. Consequently the question from now on is framed in these terms: what points of reference did this world offer to art, to the artist, to action productive of beauty? Throughout the history of civilization, down to the end of the modern period, a large part of artistic imagination ixAUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION has consisted in expressing the real. But the real no longer exists, or rather it exists only as construction; no longer as nature, but as a manufactured product. It is a living abstraction. How is one to find oneself in this? And, if it sometimes happens that the objects passing as artistic are truly beautiful, why is this the case? Is it a simple lexical question? A question of vocabu- lary? Let us summarize: the natural, the concrete and the abstract seem to become confused with each other; that which is abstract seems as natural as the image of its origin, which means that the abstract is a natural to the nth degree. What do we find around us? What can we still call nature? When I contemplate the landscapes around the valley of the Po or those of the Bourgogne, nature appears to me so laboured upon by the actions and work of man that I no longer know whether its lines and horizons are still natural or whether they are as abstract as nature transformed by man. But if this is the framework within which our consideration of nature is a prisoner — if we only know it as nature transformed and as a prolongation of human action, and if art itself (inasmuch as it, too, is human activity and a privileged sign of the relationship it has with the original models) is part of this abstract mechanism — then we shall only be able to consider art from the point of view of human activity, and we shall be in a position to appreciate xAuthor’ Introduction beauty solely from the point of view of human activity, of living labour as a capacity for the radical transforma- tion of nature and of historical reality. Artistic expetience — or so I was thinking in 1988 — has to be related to an analysis of the modes of transfor- mation of labour. So, whereas throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries work was becoming increasingly abstract, from the 1960s onwards it has experienced again a process of singularization, which manifests itself in a new figure: that of intellectual labour, which is immaterial and affective — that of a labour which pro- duces languages and relations. The change of epoch (the transition from modernity to postmodernity) could be experienced in the transformation of labour — in other words, in the transition from the massified abstraction of its value to the immaterial singularization of its expres- sive potenza. The fact that art is completely immersed in the world of the commodity no longer shocked me, since labour is also immersed in it and it cannot be otherwise. The intellectual scandal and the sense of ethical asphyxi- ation which one experiences in realizing that art is a captive of this compressed world and a prisoner of capi- talism no longer horrified me. Or rather, they no longer excited solely horror. For it was in this lower world, in contact with the horror — precisely all the violence of the commodity — that the living labour of the artist xiAUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION sometimes took the appearance of beauty. So what was it, then, this beauty? What is art when it is constantly reinvented by the possibility of the beautiful? Art, as we have said, is labour, living labour, and therefore inven- tion of singularity, of singular figures and objects, lin- guistic expression, invention of signs. There, in this first movement, are lodged the potenza of the subject in action, the subject’s capacity to deepen knowledge to the point of reinventing the world. But this expressive act only achieves beauty and the absolute when the signs and the language through which it expresses itself transform themselves into community, when they are embraced and contained within a common project. The beautiful is an invention of singularity which circulates and reveals itself as common in the multiplicity of sub- jects who participate in the construction of the world. The beautiful is not the act of imagining, but an imagi- nation that has become action. Art, in this sense, is multitude. The transformations of labour provided us with a key for reading the transformations of art. In 1988, when I wrote these letters, my claims were perhaps avantgardist — even though Lyotard and Derrida had broadly ven- tured onto this terrain during those same years. My avantgardism consisted rather in considering as definitive this transition to a figure of productive labour which is xiiAuthor’ Introduction accepted today as completed and irreversible: living labour is nothing but immaterial production, whether it is intellectual or affective. The codes offered to the reader at that time were avantgardist from the point of view of analysis, and in consequence they were perhaps some- times uncertain, sometimes cautious or, in some cases, overstated. Now this transition has been carried through to completion: the mechanisms of value, as well as the linguistic sequences which, in our view, are proper to immaterial, intellectual and affective production, have once again opened the world which the Marxian reading presented as definitively closed and compressed. I have, then, no hesitation in republishing these letters of 1988, because the conditions which at that time were implicit have today become explicit, and because the beautiful manifests itself in entirety (not only in the world of abstract labour, but also in this living labour, which unites the singularity and what is common within the multitude). xiiiLetter to Gianmarco on the Abstract 1 December 1988 Dear Gianmarco, No, really, I don’t agree. I don’t agree with your invita- tion to return to the truth. What truth? Such a return inevitably has to be ambiguous. What exactly is it, this truth of art? What we have here is only the truth of the factitious [#/ fattizio])” — the truth of that which is con- structed and which seems to us to constitute a new portion of being. This truth is not transcendent, nor does it refer to anything immutable or eternal — rather it is made, constructed by poor hands. If this is the truth to which you are referring, then we are in agreement; but it is not. Actually you are pressing me to use the word in a Platonic sense, in order to show up my ingenu- ousness and my ignorance, my forgetfulness of a substan- tial being. But this is only rhetoric. I love art from the *[Translator’s note: literally in the etymological sense, ‘man-made’, ‘created’ (vs ‘natural’).]NINE LETTERS ON ART could not be more perverse, certainly, insofar as all normal relations of being are overturned by it — but an efficacious one, which corresponds to that function of connecting the sign to the signified, which is fundamen- tal to the project of truth. This perversion is more true than any transcendence, than any traditional legitima- tion of truth. The factitious is not empty — it is being, even if we toil in it and are almost taken in by its shadows. But it is a powerful and real trickery. How solid this superficiality is! We can’t get used to it, we complain about its trickeries. But they involve us, act on us and betray us. Their effects are real — so why should the causes not be real too? No point, then, in complaining. Hic Rhodus, hic salta. or how. Are superficiality and the factitious more true :ven if you really don’t know what than the real? Whatever the case, they are the sole reality. However, you might object, we have known reality at other times and in other ways. Our biography is there to prove it. The real was large and chunky and stood before us, just and unjust, true and false, beautiful and ugly. It was between these alternatives that we conducted our struggles — and we had no doubts about their value. During the years running up to 1968 our aesthetics was *[Translator’s note: Here is Rhodes — jump here! = Show what you can do instead of talking about it. Marx, from Aesop via Hegel.] 6Letter to Gianmarco on the Abstract one of resistance, of demystification, and then of offen- sive. Peter Weiss gave an acute portrayal of the charac- teristics of the aesthetics of resistance. In 1937 Berlin, at the height of a triumphant Nazism, a group of young workers was caught up in the revival of classicism which Nazism was promoting, They were visiting a museum, to study the magnificent remains of the altar of Pergamum. But, as they relived the values of those sublime marbles — liberty, heroism, dignity, pain — and made them their own, there and then they discovered their own anti-fascism. The plastic arts of antiquity, studied philologically and politically, led those self taught workers to conclusions opposed to those of Nazi classicism. The bodies themselves filled them with con- tempt for the liturgies of Leni Riefenstahl. For us, too, the Brechtian dynamic of alienation [Verfremdung] in the adversary, with its resulting mystification, was a real practice. Vietnam and the hallucinatory world of impe- rial America were our 1937 Berlin. And so it was that, yelling and desperate, we re-appropriated the imaginary of our times. And we turned it back against our bosses. You remember the 1963 Biennale? Rauschenberg? What a grip we had on reality in those days, how we bit on it! ‘Then came ’68. For a moment we had the impression of having set our hands so firmly on reality that now it belonged to us totally, an alternative creation. Through 7