Interview with Antonio Negri

(Excerpt)

A. Negri - I see our period as a major transitional stage, like a classical interregnum ..I have a feeling that we are living through a. phase of transition from the modern into the post-modern, which is itself endowed with a series of very peculiar characteristics. And it is a phase in which a battle is taking place to decide who and how will exercise the power over the empire, over the entirety of the surface of the globe, and to identify and determine the structure of power within a market and a general structure already completed. The most fundamental concept that needs to be grasped is the capitalistic convergence over a common interest in constituting a structure of command, namely a normative structure.

J. Moroni - This structure of command which is then reinforced - if not even justified from an ideological point of view - by the 'democratic' conception of the nations of the 'West'. Regarding this.Mario Tronti has re-proposed a critic of the concept of democracy as 'everyone's power over everyone else' and has questioned the legitimacy of the forms of democratic power.On the other hand, in your last work, Multitude , also in collaboration with Michael Hardt, you see in 'global democracy' the true project of the multitude, and view democracy as a dream and an uncompleted process, nowadays dangerously threatened by war.

A. Negri - Obviously Tronti is correct when he talks about democracy as a model of government that by now resumes the capitalistic colonisation of the world and that therefore takes away the possibility for a true opposition.The fact remains, however, than when we talk about democracy, we also mean something else. I first tend to consider democracy as a model of government: from this standpoint, which is exemplified by the monarchy or aristocracy, all government types are of the one , since government in classical theory is always the government of a unity which has been constituted . The main issue to consider here, as Spinoza does when he talks about absolute democracy, is whether in place of the government of the one there could potentially be a democracy that was the expression of the power of the multitude, the multiplicity, the administration of power in this case also being the administration of the common .

I believe that democracy, as a revolutionary design of re-appropriation of power and exercise of the latter directly from below, as a scheme crossing genres and colours, which is able to stand out on a global and trans-national basis, is a totally re-proposable ideal. All the more since today's productive forms today lead more and more dramatically on one side towards a singularisation of work and activity, and on the other, towards what is a relational, affective and linguistic community.

Hence we see a ripening material basis for a new - and I underline this three times - democracy which is truly absolut e. Whether this potentiality may eventually convert itself into an institutional mode will evidently depend upon the development of the struggles and upon the various forms that this transition and interregnum will assume...

J. Moroni - This analysis of the multitude reminds me in some of its terms of what Fredric Jameson suggested in 1991, that is an analysis of the cultural dominant of post-modernism that underlined the need to create on a global scale a cognitive map of the socio-cultural and economic dynamics of late capitalism. Could one argue that you have actually suggested - with the concept of the political radicalism of the multitude - a solution or even an alternative to Jameson?

A. Negri - .I believe that our theories coincide to a considerable extent, even if in Jameson there usually is a sense of continuity; according to him the post-modern is an expression of late capitalism. For us, instead, the post-modern, beyond an expression of late capitalism, can also be conceived, or read, from the point of view of the constitution of a new culture.I believe that a number of philosophers, mainly Michel Foucault and in a less obvious fashion Gilles Deleuze, have managed to bring this new power of cultural and political construction back to the centre of the system, as much as the post-modern had ultimately evacuated the idea of innovation by pushing it to the margins in the most elegant fashions, à la Derrida, if you like. Instead, in Deleuze the concept of innovation is brought back to the centre of the system and in Foucault it is really identified as a new mode of production, as a symptom of a strong post-modern, as opposed to some weak and evanescent thought, of problems so paralysing that they became ephemeral as it happened in Jean Baudrillard, in John Rawls on the level of legal speculation and in Jurgen Habermas himself. Nowadays we are faced with what is a re-conquest of a hard ontological ground...