"Introduction to Antonio Negri's "Art and Culture in the Age of Empire and the Time of the Multitudes

Introduction to Antonio Negri's “Art and Culture in the Age of Empire and the Time of the Multitudes” Translated by Max Henninger (bio) One of the founding fathers of Italian "workerism," Antonio Negri was associated with the Marxist extra-parliamentary organization Potere operaio [Workers' Power] during the 1960s and with the Italian autonomist movement during the 1970s. He was imprisoned on political charges from 1979 to 1983 and from 1997 to 2003. Between 1983 and 1997, Negri lived in exile in Paris, where he continues to hold a university lectureship. In the Anglophone world, Negri is best known for his collaborative work with Michael Hardt, in particular for their theory of capitalist globalization, developed in Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000) and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (London and New York: Penguin Press, 2004). "Empire" is the term coined by Negri and Hardt to describe the flexible, transnational form of sovereignty that develops contemporarily with the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism. Hardt and Negri re-introduce the concept of the "multitude"—taken from the seventeenth-century political philosophy of Hobbes, Spinoza, and others—in order to designate the collective subject that labors and struggles under Empire's global regime of exploitation. In exploring the transformations of art and culture in the age of Empire, the essay translated below touches on many of the central themes of Negri's recent work. A prime example of Negri's capacity for theoretical synthesis, the essay surveys the economic, political, and cultural developments of the past decades in order to trace them to the anthropological and ontological transformation that accompanies the transition from the system of Fordist nation-states to Empire. Negri invokes a wide range of conceptual apparatuses—from Spinoza's ontology to the theory of space developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus – in order to reverse Adorno and Horkheimer's vision of capital's all-encompassing dominion and to argue for the autonomy and creativity of the multitude. Max Henninger Max Henninger (MA, PhD) lives in Berlin and works as a translator. He is the German translator of Italian novelist and poet Nanni Balestrini. His critique of Antonio Negri's theory of post-Fordism is forthcoming in the online journal Ephemera. Copyright © 2007 The Board of Regents of the University of the Wisconsin System

Democracy · Empire · Globalization · Marxist philosophy · Multitude · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Sovereignty · Law · Political Economy and Marxism