Interview with Paolo Virno

BRANDEN W. JOSEPH

RESPONSES TRANSLATED BY ALESSIA RICCIARDI

Branden W. Joseph: You are currently a university professor of communications.

Perhaps it would be worth outlining a little of your personal and

intellectual trajectory. How do you understand the relation between your

academic work and your work with Autonomia?

Paolo Virno: The decisive experience of my youth was the revolutionary

struggle in a developed capitalist country. I insist: developed. A country, that

is, in which physical survival was guaranteed, consumption relatively high,

with by that time widespread scholastic instruction. I did not participate in

an uprising against misery or dictatorship but in a radical conflict aiming at

abolishing that modern form of barbarism: wage labor. We were not “thirdworldist”

but “Americanist.” Fighting at Fiat of Turin, we were thinking of

Detroit, not Cuba or Algiers. Only where capitalist development has reached

its height is there a question of the anticapitalist revolution. This setup has

allowed us to read Marx without “Marxism”—to read Marx, putting him in

direct contact with the most radical social fights and on the other hand intertwining

the reading of him with the great authors of bourgeois modernity

(Weber, Keynes, Nietzsche, Heidegger, etc.). I participated in the group Potere

Operaio (among whose directors was also Toni Negri), contributing as much

as I could to organize fierce strikes at Fiat and the occupation of unrented

houses in Rome. In 1979 I was arrested in the trial of Autonomia Operaia—

three years of preventive jail, one of house arrest, finally (in 1987), full exoneration

in the appeals process.

I have always occupied myself with philosophy, and I have always written

about it. I was hard pressed to work on a nonreductionist, broadly conceived

materialism capable of explaining rationally all that a “linguistic animal”

(which is to say, a human being) does, thinks, desires. The first book was published

in 1986 and is entitled Convenzione e materialismo [Convention and

Materialism]; the latest in 2003 is entitled Quando il verbo si fa carne. Linguaggio

e natura umana [When the Verb Becomes Flesh: Language and Human Nature].

At the end of the 1980s, I was engaged with others in tracing the fundamental

traits of “post-Fordism”: the intellectual labor of the masses, flexibility, and so

on. From 1990 to 1993, I contributed to the journal Luogo Comune, afterward

to the journal Derive Approdi.