The sensuous religion of the multitude: Art and abstraction in Negri

Third Text

Volumn 23, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 369-382

  Toscano, Alberto ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Abstraction; Art; Communism; Imagination; Labour; Multitude; Negri; Postmodern

Indexed keywords

EID: 71149106109     PISSN: 09528822     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09528820903007651     Document Type: Review

References (26)

1. For a persuasive questioning of the idea of a continuum spanning workerism, post-workerism and autonomist Marxism see Sergio Bologna, 'A Review of Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism by Steve Wright', Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture & Politics, 16:2, 2003, available at http://www.generationonline. org/t/stormingheaven.htm
2. Peter Osborne, 'What is to be Done? (Education)', Radical Philosophy 141, available at: http:// www.radicalphilosophy.co m/default.asp?channel-id= 2188&editorial-id=23279
3. I will be quoting from the French edition: Toni Negri, Art et multitude. Neuf lettres sur l'art, Paris, Atelier/EPEL, 2005
4. Antonio Negri, Political Descartes: Reason, Ideology and the Bourgeois Project, trans and introduction Matteo Mandarini and Alberto Toscano, London and New York, Verso, 2007
5. On the relations between IUAV and workerism, see Gail Day, 'Strategies in Metropolitan Merz: Manfredo Tafuri and Italian Workerism', Radical Philosophy, 133, 2005
6. Antonio Negri, with Anne Dufourmantelle, Negri on Negri, trans M B DeBevoise, Routledge, London, 2004, p 168
7. Negri, Art et multitude, op cit, p 7
8. '"A/traverso" (Quattro frammenti)', in Settantasette. La rivoluzione che viene, eds Sergio Bianchi and Lanfranco Caminiti, second edition, DeriveApprodi, Roma, 2004, pp 181, 182
9. Settantasette. La rivoluzione che viene, 2004, pp Ibid, p 182
10. See Mauro Trotta, 'Andrea Pazienza o le straordinarie avventure del desiderio', in Settantasette, op cit, re the link between the Italian 1977 and the Anglo-American punk 1977
11. Also Keir, 'When Two Sevens Clash', available at: http:// www.nadir.org.uk/ punk.html. The movement in Bologna also registered in post-punk, as evidenced by Scritti Politti's 1978 single 'Skank Bloc Bologna' (with the 'bloc' irreverently referencing, as does their garbled name, Antonio Gramsci)
12. See Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, Faber & Faber, London, 2005. Negri himself points to the importance of punk in Art et multitude: 'Punk is a very high moment of hallucinated realist affirmation. The punk dystopia is the sensation of a possible catharsis and the certainty of the impossibility of its execution', p 77
13. Franco Berardi (Bifo), 'Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu', in Settantasette, op cit, p 173
14. See David Graeber's critical review of the 'Art and Immaterial Labour' conference, 'The Sadness of Post-Workerism', The Commoner, April 2008, available at http:// www.commoner.org.uk/ ?p=33
15. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, [1924], 1960, p 254
16. It is interesting to note that periodisation for Negri is not just a form of cognitive mapping, but can even qualify an actual aesthetic experience. Negri notes such an epiphany of periodisation when he declares, following his attendance at a performance of Pina Bausch and a production of Hamlet by Nekrosius, 'The transition is over', p 16
17. Antonio Negri, 'Metamorphoses', trans Alberto Toscano, Radical Philosophy 149, May-June 2008, p 21
18. Antonio Negri, 'Presentazione di Junkspace di Rem Koolhaas', in Dalla fabbrica alla metropolis: Saggi politici, Datanews, Rome, 2008, p 220
19. Negri, ['Metamorphoses'], op cit, p 22
20. Louis Althusser, 'Cremonini, paintre de l'abstrait', in Écrits philosophiques et politiques. Tome II, Stock/ IMEC, Paris, p 596
21. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, trans Ben Fowkes, Penguin, London, 1976, p 992
22. On the 'monstruous' in, or as, art, see Antonio Negri, 'Art and Culture in the Age of Empire and the Time of the Multitudes', trans Max Henninger, SubStance 112, 36: 1, 2007, pp 48-55
23. Negri, Fabbriche del soggetto, op cit, p 31
24. see my 'Always Already Only Now: Negri and the Biopolitical', in The Philosophy of Antonio Negri, Vol 2: Revolution in Theory, eds T Murphy and A K Mustapha, Pluto, London, 2007
25. For some very important critical remarks on the relevance of Negri's autonomism to a thinking of art after the readymade which identify his principal limitations in the 'postivisation of the negative power of labour', see John Roberts, The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade, Verso, London and New York, 2008, pp 210-15
26. See also Graeber, 'The Sadness of Post-Workerism', op cit