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.
When it comes to my job at the university . . . well, I have been doing it
only for six or seven years. And I am still a professor on a temporary contract.
Until the age of forty-five, though I was writing books of philosophy, I worked
at the most disparate sorts of jobs in the culture industry: cartoon scriptwriter,
journalist, editor for publishing houses, and so on. University has been a
casual choice, not a vocation or a destiny. It represented the possibility of
earning a better salary and having more time left for writing. Having published
different books, I could give it a try. I won a competition. My life has
not changed. And it goes well this way.