1. Absent memories, absent futures? As early as 1981, that is to say in the midst of government repression of the autonomist movement and its remains, Toni Negri writes the following: The class composition of the contemporary metropolitan subject has no memory because it has no work, because it does not want commanded labour, dialectical labour. It has no memory because only labour can construct for the proletariat a relation with past history. […] The existing memory of 1968 and of the decade that followed is now only that of the gravedigger… [….] Communist transition is absence of memory. 1 The quote addresses some of the key issues that we want to deal with in this introduction: the relation between labor and history, the ontological status of labor, the social formation and status of contemporary subjectivity in connection to the history of autonomist and post-autonomist thinking. The quote also testifies, with hindsight, of a certain historical irony. At the very moment when the Italian state seeks to actively repress the actuality of the autonomist movement, Negri declares that neither this repression nor the combative persistence of some of his former comrades makes sense, since “communist transition is the absence of memory”... Yet autonomist and operaist thought did have an afterlife. Especially over the past ten tot fifteen years the memory and resurgence of autonomist ideas and strategies in both activism and critical theory have been vital. In fact, the “class composition of the contemporary metropolitan subject” owes quite a bit to the relation with the recent past and the ways in which this past has been reworked and thought through by theorists like Negri himself, in their transition from the operaism/autonomism toward post-autonomist thinking. One only has to look at the syllabi in political and aesthetic theory to see how persistent autonomism’s memory in fact is. Toni Negri, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Maurizio Lazzarato, Christian Marazzi, and Paolo Virno have become household names for students and activists alike - although it is instructive to see who does not figure on this list, for instance the autonomist feminist Silvia Federici. ‘Postautonomism’, or at least the conceptual nebula that it refers to, has offered new readings of ‘bio-politics’, ‘precarity’, cognitive, affective and ‘immaterial labour’, the ‘social factory’, the ‘social subject’ and so on. Often it is packaged as ‘Italian thought’. However, as Stevphen Shukaitis writes: Over the recent years, there has been a veritable explosion of interest in the political current of Italian workerism, operaismo, more commonly referred to as autonomism. […] Despite this, attention paid to this development has almost inverted the workings of the radical imagination of autonomist politics. While the theoretical vocabulary and language of autonomist politics has proliferated like so many Brooklyn hipsters, fittingly enough, it has done so in a superficial manner. Paradoxically, the radical intent underlying autonomism has seemingly vanished. Rather than understanding capitalist development as having been determined by the movement of working class resistance, autonomist concepts have been used in ways that make capitalist development seem like a hermetically closed, self-directing process. (Shukaitis 2009, 32) The aim of this issue of Rethinking Marxism is to propose a different reading. That is to say, not to package post-autonomism as a supposedly uniform ‘Italian thought’ – or its twin ‘the Italian difference’ – since precisely the life and afterlife of autonomist thought demonstrates constant bifurcations and altercations, rupture upon rupture, palimpsest upon palimpsest. As the work of Steven Wright, Sergio Bianci, Guido Borio, Francesca Pozzi, Gigi Roggero and others shows, the history of (post- )autonomism has in fact many different temporalities. There is the shorter version, as written by Sergio Bianci and Lanfranco Caminiti, Marcello Tari and others. It spans the years 1973-1979 and shows the cultural, political and affective density of the autonomia movement, which included operaism/workerism, feminism, counter culture and so on. There is the long version, as written for instance by Steven Wright (Wright 2002), from operaismo in the narrow sense and its key concepts, to the ultimate diffusion into autonomia’s – the post-operaismi’s – reworking of operaist ideas, as sketched by Guido Borio and the authors of Futoro anteriore (Borio et al 2002). It is perhaps the clampdown on the autonomist movement towards the end of the 1970’s that is its most instructive moment, when it exposes the new role of the state and the intimate workings of biopolitics and surveillance. It is partly because of the similarities between that context and ours that the memory of autonomism is so much more than just that of ‘the gravedigger’, as Negri had it (and, obviously, Negri’s own international standing testifies to this). Instead of the ‘Italian difference’, we might speak in the contemporary context of the generalization of the Italian state of exception of the late 1970’s. The international dissemination of autonomist ideas and strategies is evidently closely related to this. To a very large extent, the appeal of autonomist thought today proceeds from autonomism’s traumatic end game, in its attempt to think and put into practice self-valorization and autonomy at the very moment of its, perhaps ultimate, disappearance in, first, the social factory and then neo-liberal subsumption. As in accordance with this, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi describes the Autonomia-moment in terms of “passage” and “premonition”. For him, in 1977, the time is out of joint, for we witness the closure and dissolution of “the modern horizon” (Berardi, 2009, 14). This is to say that we witness the end of the modern emancipatory ideal and concurrent modes of struggle and the emergence of a new transformative subject. 1977 thus becomes the year of a “passage beyond modernity” (27), of the “premonition of an anthropological mutation” and its “possible antidotes” (16), and all this in the context of the installation of the state of exception, the history of which we have traversed over the past three decades, be it intensified and modulated. Berardi’s argument about the relation between autonomism and history becomes even more pronounced when he states that the very name autonomia testifies to what he calls an implosion of the future. The future, as the horizon of political, social or sexual emancipatory thought, dissolves. According to Berardi, autonomia represents the first and most poignant attempt to endorse this dissolution. This is also, however, where according to Bifo a future beyond the future lies for autonomist thought: “We need to resume the thread of analysis of social composition and decomposition if we want to distinguish possible lines of a process of recomposition to come” (31). Autonomia should help to realize the “exodus from the kingdom of exploitation and the creation of a new social sphere, which has nothing to do with power, labour or the market” (25). This issue of an absent or viable future – and we recall the title of a pamphlet issued during the University Occupations in California in 2009: Communiqué from an Absent Future – is also central in what Negri’s calls, in Time for Revolution, “the teleology of the common” and the ontological transformation that “frees us from sovereignty” (Negri 2003, 226-227). In fact, the term that Negri uses to label this teleology of the common is dystopia: “While utopia appropriates a future fully determined, the common language of dystopia invests a tocome that remains empty. But dystopia is vigorous because it projects the power of innovation into the void” (236). In Negri, it is precisely the absence of a future that defines the temporality of the constituent power of the multitude. If the passage from modernity to post-modernity is the passage from utopia to dystopia, this passage becomes the precondition for “a power that extends the common into the to-come, that constructs bodies in common on the edge of time” (250). This constitutive power extends itself from its biopolitical base, “across all horizons of being, and so to every instant of temporality” (233), thus realizing what Negri, as in the quote with which we began, called “the absence of memory”. It concerns not so much a defeatist dystopia, then, that acknowledges the vanity of past struggles. On the contrary, it is a dystopia that remains entirely constructive, and that takes leave of the “Power of the State and every transcendental illusion in order to produce new common co-operative temporalities” (259). There is no before or after the multitude, then. There is but the to-come-ness of bio-political generation, since generation is something that “proceeds from the multitude” (232). Negri’s movement, however, from a modern political statist temporality (geared towards a future horizon) to a post-modern dystopian temporality (rooted in bio-political generation) is criticized - rightly, in our analysis - by Vittorio Morfino.2 The latter shows how the so-called absence of memory in Negri is in fact operated by enforcing a rupture in ontological terms, specifically two ontologically distinct forms of time: a time of power and a time of potential, or the empty time of state repression and the full time of living labour (Morfino 2010, 269). In Morfino’s reading, Negri radically disarticulates ontology and history. It is out fear for recuperation within a dialectically shaped history, intimately associated with the workings of power, that Negri defines the multitude not so much in terms of a to-comeness but of “the eternal present of ontology” (269). Or to put this differently, a paradoxical to-comeness without memory nor future condemns the multitude to the eternal present that is characterized by metamorphosis, that he defines as “an inner and collective modification/transformation, both singular and ethical, led in the multitudes and by them” (Negri in Chieza and Toscano 2009, 19). Yet, going back to Negri’s sources Spinoza and Althusser, Morfino argues that for these thinkers the multitude is no less than the articulation of, or Spinozian connexio between, multiple temporalities that are irreducible to an essential contemporaneity. In Morfino’s reading, Spinoza and Althusser demonstrate that the concept of ‘multitude’ shows the “primacy of the encounter” over form – as Negri would no doubt agree on. However, this signifies the dissolution of both horizon and contemporaneity in favor of the infinite multiplication of temporalities for which, as Morfino writes, “power, violence and ideology are not the other, the empty shell that imprisons it, but the form itself of its intertwined necessity” (269). For Morfino, consequently: The point is not to operate the imaginary dissolution of power […] to make way for the Dionysian triumph in an ontological beyond […] but to think the non-contemporaneity of the multitude in its radicality, the articulation of its multiple times, through an archeology of the present from which may result the formulation of a complex strategy that is up to the task and the complexity of the planes and the strata of the real. (Morfino 2010, 269). This non-contemporaneity of the multitude is caught in a complex connexio of a multiplicity of encounters and the effects they produce, for instance between the still active residues of Fordism and Taylorism in the post-Fordist condition, of modernity and antemodernity, of a variety of libidinal investments, and so on. Differentiating between constituted and constituent power therefore might not be a matter of operating an ontological fracture, but rather, as Stevphen Shukaitis argues, of being able to tell the difference “between a living social struggle and one that has become undead” (Shukaitis 2009, 46). Post-autonomism here might mean to remember that class composition is, precisely, a continuous process – and that we are facing an antagonism that continually shifts. For Shukaitis, we need “to keep open an antagonism without closure that is continually composed and recomposed, to develop the necessary tools to resist the pervasive subdivision and suburbanization of the radical imagination” (10). This is a strategy that, in fact, works on rather than against the “energies unleashed around us” and might take us “far from where we might like to go” (44) – not in the least by refusing “to fetishize particular dramatic, visible moments of transformation”. (15) Although the criticism with regard to Negri is not explicit, here, it is of relevance. The absence of a foreseeable future, rather than being transformed into an ontological dystopia, sanctions the more brutal lessons of the experience of historical autonomism. The future might give you exactly what you were asking for, but with wholly different intent and consequences. One evident example would be the afterlife of the precario bello (the ‘beautiful precarity’) of the late 1970’s… 2. Subjects in Formation: From ‘Social Worker’ to ‘Cognitariat’ For Shukaitis the actuality of autonomist thought lies precisely in it never having shunned the complexity of the strata of the real but in having forced us to confront these head on. Against the absence of memory, autonomism has, as Shukaitis calls it, “played the Marxist LP backwards” to reveal how “the social technologies and processes through which social insurgency and revolt are turned back against themselves and incorporated into founding and modifying regimes of accumulation and dispossession.” (2009, 39) If today we can indeed speak of a “crisis in the radical imagination” it is to the extent that it reflects “the inability or refusal to see the ways in which many of the horrors we rage against today are precisely the dreams of yesterday’s revolutionaries turned upside down.” (47) This in fact echoes the operaist Negri, who writes in 1977 in Domination and Sabotage: For capital there is no problem: […] the solution of the crisis consists in a restructuring of the system that will combat and reintegrate the antagonistic components of the proletariat within the project of political stabilization […] The continuing work of reinforcing the state-form – that is, of the imposition of the law of value (albeit in continuously modified form) - as a measure and a synthesis of stabilization and restructuring – has never faltered. (2005, 232- 233) If the power of the contemporary Crisis-State, as Negri calls it (238), lies in the fact that its content is nothing more than a continual restructuring to re-impose the law of value, that is as empty as it is efficacious and violent (because of this vacuity…), the practical and theoretical starting point remains not the abandonment but “the intensification of both the concept and the experiences of proletarian selfvalorization” (235). Or, as Berardi writes: “the process of the becoming autonomous of workers away from their disciplinary role has provoked a social earthquake which triggered capitalist deregulation” (2009, 76). The various experiments of operaist and autonomist workers’ self-valorization – and to a larger extent: of the advent throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s of a multiplicity of newfangled socio-political subjects – were not left unanswered. They were, in fact, met with the ever-increasing flexibilization and the fractalization of labour. One meaning of ‘post-autonomous’ for contemporary critical thought might include the awareness of the ambiguity and complexity of self-valorization, such as its appropriation, torsion and ultimate perversion by state and capital. With Berardi, we might say that “there is a close relationship between [the autonomist notion of] ‘refusal of work’, informatization of the factories, downsizing, outsourcing of jobs and the flexibilization of labour” (76). However, as Berardi also stresses (and omits to develop in his own writings), we should be cautious not to reduce this relationship to a simplistic narrative of cause and effect. Post-autonomous thought should avoid both the narrative of capitalist reappropriation of a supposed pure desire for self-valorization and the narrative of the fundamentally speculative character of such a desire as merely reflecting tendencies inherent to capitalism. What is not yet theorized enough is what happens between these two narratives: which institutions and apparatuses (re)produce, capture and thwart any such desire? Moreover, is ‘desire’ the most satisfactory category? Here, the ontological rift operated in Negri’s recent texts and Berardi’s techno-pathological mantra that “the self-organization of cognitive work is the only way to go beyond the psycho-pathic present” (82) are equally unsatisfactory. In part, we might argue that post-autonomous thought has resulted from the frictions that were inherent to the complex relationship between workerism/operaism proper and Autonomia as a movement that reunited a variety of socio-political claims and appeals for the recognition and formation of new forms of subjectivity – political, professional, sexual and otherwise. On the one hand – and this is what undoubtedly constitutes their ongoing actuality – workerists like Mario Tronti analyzed adequately that “at the highest level of capitalist development, the social relation becomes a moment of the relation of production, the whole of society becomes an articulation of production” (Tronti in Wright 2002, 37). On the other hand, the Autonomia movement showed that operaismo failed to fully grasp the theoretical and activist consequences of its analysis of new class compositions and social subject formations. When Tronti writes that “the whole of society exists as a function of the factory”, for instance, the emphasis is still too much on the factory and its correlated forms of subjectivity. For the autonomists of the 1970’s, such as Christian Marazzi, the operaists “failed to realize that the state, through its strategy of bypassing the factory as privileged instrument of command […] had begun the formation of a new subject outside of the relations of production” (Marazzi in Wright 2002, 209). Today, most exemplary, this formation continues to use the instruments of debt and rent, and the marketing of personality and sexuality in a consumerism apparently unharmed by a half-decade of crisis. Conversely, for Steven Wright, the demise of Autonomia lies in the fact that, having abandoned the factory as a matrix for the analysis of new social and subjective formations, it in fact got lost in the intricacies of the new modes of subjectivation and, we might add, lost sight of the dialectic that tied these to reconfigured forms of capitalism and the state, even if the latter appeared in its emptied-out form as CrisisState. So far, post-autonomous thought has negotiated this tension by the recognition of new modes of subjectivation as an intrinsic part of capitalist and state restructuring. But we may ask if key concepts such as ‘immaterial labour’ and ‘cognitive capitalism’ are actually capable of drawing the line between an emancipatory potential and mere power effects, and to what extent this affects strategic notions such as ‘exodus’ (see below, paragraph four). In for example Paolo Virno and Matteo Pasquinelli’s work, as we will see, the ambivalence of the autonomous conceptual vocabulary becomes pivotal, but also results in a Russian doll effect when the recognition of ambivalence generates the search for new conceptual safeguards. Here, we touch upon a, if not the core problematic of operaism that has remained equally fundamental to Autonomia: the refusal of any form of mediation between proletarian emancipation and the (history of) capitalism. The ‘refusal of work’ constituted the refutation of capitalism’s most basic category, labour, both practically and theoretically. The core principles of operaism/autonomism are grounded in an ingenuous but far-reaching logic: no self-valorization can pass through the categories laid out by the adversary. It is a matter of all or nothing. This idea stands its ground in post-autonomism when the multitude’s emancipation takes place in capital’s beyond – that is to say, not so much a historical beyond, but rather in the construction of a world parallel to it. Hence post-autonomism’s idiom of ‘exodus’, ‘desertion’ or ‘ontological leaps’. Even if post-autononism draws heavily upon the techno-scientific dimension of contemporary capitalism – veering at times, in Berardi in particular, towards techno-determinism – it does not see in this an instrument for negotiation or mediation. Loyal to Tronti’s axiom that “if the working class does not emancipate itself from capital, capital will most certainly emancipate itself from the working class” post-autonomism only assumes the ever-increasing rift between capital and workers. In post-autononism the operaist all-or-nothing logic firmly remains at work, often leading to a rhetoric of the oddly anachronistic historical/dialectical notion of a ‘last chance to free ourselves from capitalism’... We may see the recent work of Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi as emblematic of this dual or, better still, bipolar logic. The back-and-forth between hyperactivity and depression that, according to Berardi, characterizes the contemporary subject also seems to rhythm his own writings. On the one hand, Berardi describes how a reversal of “the intense and prolonged investment of mental and libidinal energies in the labour process has created the conditions for a psychic collapse” (2009, 38). In Berardi’s work we end up with a non-subject thoroughly drained by the apparatuses of the Crisis-State. As he writes: “The juridical person is free to express itself, to choose it representatives, to be entrepreneurial at the level of politics and the economy. […] Only the person has disappeared. What is left is like an inert object, irrelevant and useless.” (33) On the other hand, it is to that very same subject that Berardi assigns the role of insurrectionary catalyst. Hence, Berardi’s notion of insurrection appears foremost a therapeutic, cathartic notion. Depression, panic and anger need to be traversed, the very worst needs to be confronted head-on in order to be left behind once and for all. Berardi’s ‘Exhaustion and Senile Utopia of the Coming European Insurrection’ (2010) paints a bleak picture indeed by suggesting that any opposition to what he calls “the catastrophic aggression against social life” and its vital psychosomatic components through precarious labor and the decomposition of social solidarity, now swings between massive yet fruitless demonstrations and the melancholic withdrawal from “the game of work and consumption” by large social groups, that might just succeed to “create new, enhanced forms of co-habitation, a village economy within the metropolis” (2010). Once again, Berardi emphasizes the vital role of the ‘cognitariat’, with mantra-like statements such as: Only the autonomy of mental labour from economic rule can deactivate the suicidal mechanism of war and the obsession with growth that devastates the planet. Cognitive, networked, precarious labour is the transversal function capable of recombining the social elements in perennial mutation according to a non-accumulative, non-competitive and non-aggressive principle (2009, 9). One wonders how to read these mantras: as so many attempts to identify compositional lines of flight (even if these turn out to be interrupted once and again) or as a despairing clasp on a conceptual safeguard (mirroring Negri’s Spinozian ontological safeguard) that assures us that “only a movement of researchers, a high tech labour movement of the cognitariat that is autonomously organized” can save us from ruin? (59, 61). However in Berardi’s most recent texts, at the very moment we are tempted to allow ourselves a discrete sigh of relief, even this safeguard falters, as he writes that “the subjectivity of the general intellect is dismantled as a precondition to a much broader subjugation of the processes of knowledge, to the techno-linguistic enslavement of cognitive behavior in the sphere of production and consumption.” (2010, 24). Berardi’s writing thus seems to emulate the workings of the contemporary biopolitical apparatus that regulates by being the instrument of mental and physical destitution and therefore leaves no margin unoccupied. The apparatus works both ways: it structures subjectivity, just as much as it allows for, and incites, the outpouring of affects. As a consequence, the contemporary subject is prone to hysteria, panic attacks, hypes. It alternates between depressive and manic states of self-loss and emotional expenditure. Its mood swings simply define it. We might say that today, as Berardi’s writings show, we are not even given the comfort of catastrophe. Instead crisis – whether financial, ecological, or subjective – is precisely what is being put to work. As is the case for Virno (see below, paragraph four), for Berardi there can be no reassuring ‘third term’ that serves as an escape route for the multitude. Yet as indicated, in Berardi this absence of a third term becomes an extremely unsettling biopolarity. The overmediated subject is immediately exposed to power – this, precisely, is a vital meaning of ‘precarity’. With respect to this, we may ask ourselves, however, to what extent withdrawal, exodus or poverty truly by-pass the dispositive and the law of value it upholds by means of what we might call psychic and physical primitive accumulation. Raising the question does not necessarily mean falling prey to what Matteo Pasquinelli calls a hyperfoucauldian paranoia, nor does it necessarily means having recourse to an updated dialectical materialism or neo-Jacobin kitsch celebrating the ‘will of the people’. Raising the question shows the complexity of what perhaps has permanently been at the heart of the autonomist project: a political anthropology that today is intimately related to the anatomy of the dispositive (see below, paragraph four, for an extended discussion of such a political anthropology). 3. Multitude and the Subject, Once More For the French collective Tiqqun autonomism’s legacy consists of having thought the possibility of the revolt of a non-subject within the frame of a “negative anthropology” that was aimed at politicizing processes of subjectivation (2010, 12). One way of reading these processes – that we may also call processes of ‘generation’ - is to show that they include residues of branded identity and distorted power effects; that they are an interweaving of histories, encounters, desires and biological constants. As just one example of the many ties between French and Italian thinking, Tiqqun’s ideas tie in with recent work by Paolo Virno on the profoundly ambivalent nature of constituent power. For Virno, what founds the constituent power of the multitude is a certain force of negation, which has its roots in “the risky instability of the human animal” that, being labeled “evil”, has traditionally served as the State’s most prominent excuse for the formation and maintenance of its sovereignty, allowing it, for example to distinguish between the reassuring stability of ‘the people’ versus the multitude (Virno 2008, 16). Considering and accepting the problematic, undefined and possibly dangerous temperament of the human animal that is “characterized by negation” (18), Virno writes about the multitude’s subject: “sometimes aggressive, sometimes united, prone to intelligent cooperation, but also to the war between fractions, being both the poison and the antidote, such is the multitude” (40). In radicalizing Aristotle’s thought on the issue, Virno contends that the political human animal is foremost a linguistic animal. Negation and the modality of the possible are the work of language, or the effects of our mode of existence as speaking bodies. More generally, as a non-substantial institution and “deprived of any limit whatsoever in its processes” (50), language is the institution that renders all other institutions possible. However, and pace Habermas (whom Virno defines as a “happy-go-lucky philosopher”…) language dangerous potential resides in the fact that the value of any linguistic element “consists in its not being x”. By means of this characteristic, language is able to radicalize aggression “beyond measure” (18) if only for its ability “to enunciate something like ‘this is not a man’” (20). The latter possibility is what Virno defines as “truly radical evil” that nevertheless shares “the same root as the good life” (21) since negation can also be infinitely redirected against itself. It mayalso concern the negation of murderous statements such as ‘this is not a man’ and therefore the opening toward collaborative life-forms. It is this political opening up toward a good life that gives us a radically different idea of potential than the one presented by Negri. For Virno, the multitude is a historico-natural category and as the ‘many’ it introduces “uncertainty into the public sphere, and also the undifferentiated potential of the [human] animal that, being deprived of an environmental niche, is open to the world.” (37) If the advent of the multitude marks the crisis of the modern, central state, this is because “the crisis derives from the impossibility of leaving the natural state.” (37) Consequently, according to Virno, the main question faced by the multitude is its self-government in the face of the disturbing ambivalence that characterizes the linguistic aspect of the human species (51 ). Since language also defines thought, Virno has recourse to ritual in order to outline a modus operandi for new means of self-government. The political here becomes therapeutic: Ritual fulfills a therapeutic function not because it erects a barrier against the crisis of presence, but because on the contrary, it goes back over each stage ofthe crisis and tries to overturn the traces of each of those stages. Ritual praxis upholds extreme danger, widens uncertainty and chaos, and returns to the primal setting of the original hominid. (Virno 2008, 52) Central to Virno’s ritualized, symbolically repetitive forms of anthropogenesis is the notion of katechon, that he finds in Schmitt’s reading of Paul: Just as presence itself is nothing more than a constant redemption from the crisis of presence, so too, the nature of anthropos is equal to the regression and repetition of anthropogenesis. Katechon not only oscillates between the negative and the positive, without ever expunging the negative, it also safeguards the state of oscillation and its persistence as such. (Virno 2008, 60) The ritualistic-linguistic katechon restrains but does not remove uncertainty; it lives off the very instability it wards off since it functions by means of semantic excess; and it is able to adapt itself to the state of exception, when it is not, pace Schmitt, the defining marker of the sovereign state, but “indicates rather the action and discourse of the multitude.” (62) In the work of Matteo Pasquinelli we find a similar effort to re-conceptualize the labour of the multitude in terms of ‘evil’ (Georges Bataille is a constant reference in Pasquinelli), but whereas Virno’s ‘animal’ is the common (and one could argue wrong) translation of the Greek zoon, with Pasquinelli animality gets an intrinsic or conceptual meaning. What he calls ‘animal spirits’ haunt immaterial labour and the biopolitical generation of the multitude. As Pasquinelli argues: In a general sense, the animal body is another name for living labour; the social body feeding the parasitic economy of advanced capitalism, the sexualized unconscious of mass media and cultural production, but also the dark side of the neo-conservative multitude. While intellectual discourse remains blind to the beast, capitalism siphons money right out of it and the Empire converts the animal energy into the force of its imperial guard. (Pasquinelli 2008, 27). When Pasquinelli calls for a redefinition of the commons, this very definition would have to enable us to face the profoundly parasitic and therefore profoundlybiomorphic character, or should we say ‘nature’, of contemporary capitalism, which also underpins the commons that emerge from or against it. Instead of withdrawing into what he calls the “sub-religion of separatism”, Pasquinelli states that we should acknowledge and take as our point of departure the extent to which contemporary forms of the commons are “haunted and infested by three conceptual beasts: corporate parasites, […] hydra of gentrification; the bicephalous eagle of power and desire” (14). And note that whereas Pasquinelli seems to be speaking metaphorically, here, he defines the three conceptually instead, as not just beast-like, but indeed beastly. Against this biomorphic backdrop, the familiar poststructuralist vocabulary, with its fixation of codes and symbols, will not take us very far. As for his stance towards this option, Pasquinelli is clear: “The immediate psychopolitical consequence of this position is a code claustrophobia that disallows any potential engagement” (19). It concerns a form of claustrophobia that becomes paradigmatic in Slavoj Žižek’s recurrent impetus to “read, read, read” so that we might magically re-emerge as true Leninist master strategists from our cabinets de lecture. It is also a claustrophobia that we encounter in the now prevalent notion of “life as code” (the work of Eugene Thacker is emblematic here)3 and that firmly remains within the mimetic paradigm according to Pasquinelli (57). With respect to this, Pasquinelli underlines that: The central difference between a post-operaist and a postmodern approach lies precisely in the conception of language: for Virno, language has become a means of production; for Zizek, language repeats the symbolic order of the dominant ideology. That is, once again, the ancient struggle between demons of production and angels of representation. (Pasquinelli 2008, 25) However, it appears that post-autonomous thought is not entirely beyond this classical, celestial or heavenly battle between demons and angels, production and representation, or material and immaterial labour, for that matter. Virno’s considering language only as a form of production appears to be a counterbalance for Negri’s phobia of mediation. What is of interest, nevertheless, is Pasquinelli’s attempt to go through this bipolar balance and to analyze and plug into “the biomorphic unconscious of immaterial and cultural production” that consist in: The physiology of surplus and excess energies flowing under any technological environment, the instinctual and irrational forces also running behind the new cognitive and libidinal modes of capitalist accumulation. […] The animal body is the productive engine of the multitudes finally described in all its variants: cognitive, affective, libidinal and physical. It is a way to combine surplus production, social conflicts, libidinal excess and political passions along a single terrain. (Pasquinelli 2008, 27) On the face of it, Pasquinelli comes close, here, to Berardi’s assertion that the immaterial or cognitive commons remain firmly inserted into “the fleshy circuits of human subjectivity”. In the end, however, his analysis is not bipolar at all, but material through and through: when he states that: “Residual forces from a prior biological stage resurface for not being deeply civilized by the digital evolution” (29). Consequently, today, radical critique and oppositional practices should tap into these animal spirits against an “abstract and frictionless notion of the commons [that] is taken as a general paradigm for any sort of political agency. Reclaiming the obscure reality of the commons means recovering the productive animal force before its turns into the dark matter of capitalism.” (29) The question here, however, is what exactly this ‘before’ of the productive animal force, the biochemical surplus, might mean. Pasquinelli runs the risk of dreaming up an attractive, yet merely wishful surplus-asexteriority. Moreover, living in times of bio-political economies might mean, as Melinda Cooper has analyzed in Life as Surplus, that that there are no true animals left, or that, in effect, all animals are turned, in one way or another, into parasites. 4. Of Democratic Animals and Machinic Intellectuals: Post-Autonomism as Knowledge-Production. Virno and Pasquinelli’s emphasis on bio- and anthropopolitics (with their references to ritual and anthropogenesis) echoes Mario Tronti’s recent call that “There will be no genuine and effective critique of democracy without a profound anthropologicalinvestigation, a social anthropology but also and individual anthropology, taking ‘individual’ here too in the sense of the thought-practice of difference” (Tronti in Chieza and Toscano 102). For Tronti, today we witness the “epochal encounter between homo oeconomicous and homo democraticus” whose cross-breeding gives birth to this peculiar third political species: the ‘animal democraticum’ – the true “subject of the spirits of capitalism”, according to Tronti. In post-autonomous discourse this democratic animal gets different names, such as, most vociferously, ‘the Bloom’ in Tiqqun (see, for example, Tiqqun 2010). As we argued above, in particular in relation to Virno, it is the potential of a thoroughly novel political anthropology that underpins post-autonomist thought that may prove to be its most vital feature. Certainly, any alternative to what Tronti calls the “mass biopolitics” that goes under the name of democracy has to proceed from a far-reaching critique of the different incarnations of the anthropological subject. If not, we may say with Tronti, we remain hopelessly stuck in a system In which singularity is permitted for the private but denied to the public. The ‘common’ which is spoken of today is really that in-common which is already wholly taken over by this kind of self-dictatorship, this kind of tyranny over oneself which is the contemporary form of that brilliant idea: voluntary servitude. (Tronti in Chieza and Toscano 103) For Tronti it is only in escaping the web of ‘really existing democracy’ that we can imagine escaping ‘the very web of neo-liberal power’. If the anthropologicalconditions of democracy – that is to say: its implied definition and active configuration of what it means to be human, of the anthropos – are not put into crisis “the subject itself cannot manage any effective political maneuver in this situation, through an alternative network, for the sake of another historical break” (106). In this sense, the ‘post’ in post-autonomism refers to its ventures away from more narrowly defined issues of socio-economic relations (a move already prefigured in the passage from operaism to Autonomia) to the anthropological field of social relations per se. Thus conceived, post-autonomist thought raises the question of what kind of knowledge production this implies. Again, here, post-autonomism does not signify a break with 1970’s autonomism any more than Autonomia signified a break with operaism, but rather it rearticulates some of its key questions. In this case, that of knowledge production: to what extend does the ‘object’ of study – the workers’ condition - affect the means by which it is addressed? Or better still: how to reverse the hierarchy between object and subject, worker and researcher? Operaism privileged ‘militant research’, such as the workers’ inquiry that proceeds from the collective knowledge of the workers themselves as it was collected by researchers (such as Raniero Panzieri). How would such a militant – or holistic – research take shape today? As Toni Negri and Judith Revel write: “To re-appropriate the common, we must first of all produce a drastic critique of it.” (Negri and Revel in The Edu-Factory Collective, 175). In our particular context of knowledge production and cultural production this also implies a drastic institutional and emotional auto-critique. Not in the least, insofar the inflicted reality-checks of the past decade haven’t already done so, this means abandoning phantasies of the ‘cutting edge character’ of academic knowledge production. As Stevphen Shukaitis argues in Imaginal Machines, today, the university is anything but a vanguard. There is no point in celebrating the university as a pinnacle of immaterial labour, because it has in fact lost its monopoly on knowledge production. It is in this context that Jack Bratich coins the notion of the ‘machinic intellectual’ (as a Deleuzian counter-weight to Gramsci’s ‘organic intellectual’) (Bratich in Graeber et al. 2007, 137). Today’s scholars are embedded in a host of institutions, policies and organizations (that is to say in a never-ending race for funding, social relevance, media exposure and corporate partnerships that force them to star in a one-man/woman variety show…). According to Bratich, it is precisely this embeddedness that could constitute a future for the intellectual, who would no longer be representative of a larger social cause, but who, as machinic intellectual, functions as “an interface, embedded as a specific intellectual in its professional and disciplinarian skirmishes which themselves are now embedded in a larger circuit” (150). The machinic intellectual is embedded, yet equally active and productive, a translator and exchanger, a modulator, transversal resistor and circuit breaker. The future of critical studies thus lies in “machinic intellectuals who are collaborating with nonacademic machinic intellectuals. Together, they are producing new circuits of exit.” (150) With Skukaitis, we might also say that today anycompositional analysis refuses to represent or communicate struggles (in view of future realizations or demands), but rather explores “the forms of composition found within the situation, or in the various processes of interaction, collective valorization and productive compatibilities found between different projects” (2009, 19). One such attempt at a new compositional analysis is made by activist/academic initiatives such as the Counter Cartographies Collective. As Maribel Casas-Cortés and Sebastian Cobarrubias show: Our spatial understanding of the university as a discrete and untouched entity [is] totally inadequate […] and obscures the multiple roles of universities in employment and flexible labour markets, the knowledge economy and corporate research, defense contracts and recruiting finance capitalism through loans, university endowments and investments and gentrification. (CasasCortés and Cobarrubias in Graeber et al. 113) If the contemporary university, “erases the bodies and the materiality involved in knowledge production” (122), a critical use of academic disciplines such as cartography can precisely expose “underground realities otherwise off the radar for regular discourse” (117) and, crucially, as an “interlocking system with multiple power and counterpower networks flowing through it.” (123) Cartography here becomes a tool against the imaginary of the ivory tower that, both ironically and tragically, is all too often used by activists to brush off a supposed lack of true engagement and as an excuse for the university’s slow financial euthanasia by government policies and managerial board. To reappropriate knowledge, or, for that matter, cultural production, is a daunting task. As Brian Holmes writes in Escape the Overcode, with regard to the highly ambiguous role of subjectivity within the knowledge and cultural industries, it is crucial to think through: …the tremendous effectiveness of the new motivational paradigm and the particular power of conviction it seems to hold for those involved in culturalized production. The reason for this is that even within hyperflexible markets giving all the advantages to the state or corporate buyer, everything connected to the arts still offers a chance for self-expression and a veritable economy of self-development – which is no small attraction. (Holmes 2010, 37). When Holmes is talking about culturalized production, here, the knowledge production in the university and especially in the humanities and social sciences is intrinsic to it. Analogously, everything that is connected to the arts, here, offering a chance for self-expression, also concerns very much those working in the academy. With respect to this, perhaps the most urgent significance of the idea of postautonomy, and the most urgent aspect of the autonomist legacy, is to be finally finished with the attraction of this economy of ‘self-development’ that governs a host of social, political and cultural circuits.