Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 14 Number 2, August 2013
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Murphy, Timothy S. Antonio Negri: Modernity and the Multitude. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012. 274 pp.ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4319-9; ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4320-5(pb)
Reviewed by
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur
Antonio Negri is undoubtedly one of the most influential thinkers of the world today. However, apart from his Empire which he co-authored with Michael Hardt, few of his works are known to the Anglophone world. Timothy S. Murphy’s Antonio Negri: Modernity and the Multitude attempts to fill this lacuna by giving a comprehensive and concise introduction to Negri’s philosophy and work.
Murphy gives an account of the life and works of Negri; more importantly, he places Negri’s work in the context of his life in an attempt to link the two. This reflects the ‘biographical materialism’ that Murphy observes to be Negri’s method in his books on Spinoza and Hegel, which is that of placing people in their socio-cultural contexts in an attempt to understand their philosophy. This works very well, just as Murphy claims it does for Negri’s work also. He is of the view that Negri’s life and work ‘have been defined by a series of dilemmas that are metaphysical and quotidian” (8). The seemingly irreconcilable difference between his “institutional position and his militant activity”(9) according to Murphy, influenced Negri’s early work. His argument is that Negri should be seen as “a type of thinker who might superficially seem to be very different from the Marxist radical and from the postmodern metaphysician, who define his popular reception: the Renaissance humanist” (11). The book persuades us convincingly of the spirit of Renaissance humanism that permeates Negri’s work, especially his concept of modernity, from his early books to the latest Commonwealth. The crux of Murphy’s argument is that it is Negri’s grounding in Renaissance humanism as opposed to other contemporary thinkers, which makes his work different and original. He views Negri as a political philosopher in the line of Machiavelli, Spinoza and Marx and makes use of Negri’s scholarly books on Spinoza, Hegel and Marx to validate his argument.
However, what made Negri a known name beyond the confines of his country and Europe was the highly influential Empire which he co-authored with Michael Hardt. This refreshing and thought-provoking analysis of the globalized world and the new decentred empire also gave us the provocative concept of the ‘multitude’. Murphy traces the origin of this concept to Negri’s ‘workerism’, a concept that developed in post-world war Italy. Workerism which had derogatory overtones in Marxism, became for Negri and his co-workers a positive focus on the worker and his capability for action, independent of the party hierarchy. Together with this theoretical development came Negri’s active involvement with the industrial workers in Italy resulting in the foundation of an organization called Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power). By the mid-70s he was trying to theorize the “socialized worker”, the new worker who could not be adequately engaged by the traditional party structures. This worker was part of the socialization engendered by the new capitalist system, who worked collaboratively “to produce not only commodities but also the tissue of social life itself” (76). Negri insisted that the traditional systems were inadequate to cope with this new form of worker who did not form a homogeneous category like the mass worker. Negri and like-minded people who were involved with workers’ issues in Italy gave rise to autonomous activist groups that were collectively called Autonomia. This practical experience engendered the idea of counter-power in Negri, the “negative and negating image of state power” (100) that the proletariat has to develop in its struggle with the state. He also believed that power has to be “dissolved into a network of powers, and the independence of the class is to be constructed via the autonomy of individual revolutionary movements” (100). It is in this context that he advocated the use of violence if necessary; this was one of the aspects of his work that caused deep misunderstanding and ultimately led to his imprisonment without even a proper trial in Italy.
Murphy observes that although the foundation of his intellectual work was laid in the earlier phases of his career in Italy, it was his arrest in 1979 and later exile in Paris where he came into contact with Deleuze and Guattari that honed Negri’s work to its present form. In the solitude of his imprisonment he revisited the work of Spinoza and Hegel, enabling him to develop his concept of the multitude, a term that he borrowed from Spinoza. It was prison life that made him take what Murphy describes as the ‘linguistic turn’ of analyzing the work of Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi and the Book of Job. Murphy points out that these works of Negri – Gentle Broom: An Essay on Giacomo Leopardi’s Ontology (published in 1987) and Labor of Job (published in 1990) – have not received the attention that they deserve. Murphy has given adequate textual space to these works and observes how they are in keeping with the general tenor of Negri’s work as a whole. The sojourn in Paris also paved the way for collaborative work; a happy exercise considering that it gave rise to four books including the hugely influential Empire where he worked along with Michael Hardt. Hardt was a graduate student at the University of Washington when he first met Negri and it is to the credit of both men that they were able to surmount the differences in age and culture to produce an intellectually stimulating work.
Empire (published in 2000) elicited tremendous response when it was first published. The work was an analysis of the globalized world, differentiating the empire from the traditional concept of imperialism as a decentred and de-territorialized entity that knows no geographical boundaries. The book drew on Negri’s work while borrowing many concepts from postcolonial studies as well as feminism. There were positive as well as negative responses to the work – postcolonial theorists, for instance, were unhappy with its western orientation. Negri and Hardt chose not to respond to their critics but followed up their work with a sequel in 2004 – Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. This was an analysis of the post 9/11 world with the US “war on terror” and other sites of conflict like Iraq and Afghanistan. The concept of the multitude was followed up with the concept of the ‘common’ in Commonwealth published in 2009 where the term ‘common’ was used to denote the “common wealth of the natural world – the air, the water, the fruits of the soil, and all nature’s bounty” (220).
Murphy has managed to give a lucid and highly readable account of all of Negri’s major works. This is a remarkable achievement considering how difficult a writer Negri is. Murphy is determined to make the reader understand Negri the thinker and his works, and so uses a language that is clear and jargon-free. The book avoids being superficial and has managed to touch upon even the less discussed aspects of Negri’s work. However, Murphy is not entirely successful in explaining the rather violent strand of militancy that is at times discernible in Negri’s views. But this does not in any way detract from the value of the book and it is indispensable reading for anybody who wishes to have a more than perfunctory introduction to Negri and his thought. One pernickety observation, though, is that Murphy could have provided a list of Negri’s works along with the year of publication and English translations.