Arte e multitudo

by Antonio Negri, Nicolas Martino (Contributor), Marco Assennato (Contributor)

Che cos’è l’arte nella postmodernità? Cosa ne è del bello nel passaggio dal moderno al postmoderno? Cos’è il sublime quando la sussunzione reale del lavoro al capitale e l’astrazione completa del mondo si sono compiute? Sono le domande a cui risponde Toni Negri, in una veste di scrittura inedita, con dieci lettere ad altrettanti amici (tra i quali Giorgio Agamben, Massimo Cacciari, Nanni Balestrini). Si discute dell’astratto, del lavoro collettivo, del costruire, dell’evento, del corpo, della biopolitica e del comune. Contro ogni retorica debolista, questo piccolo dizionario dell’arte ci permette di scoprire la resistenza etica nella postmodernità. Contro il cinismo spettacolare del mercato che fa dell’opera d’arte una merce tra le altre qui si afferma un’idea dell’arte radicalmente democratica. Contro la sconfitta tragica che fa dell’arte «il prodotto dell’angelo», qui si afferma che «tutti gli uomini sono angeli». Un libro che dimostra la poliedricità del pensiero di Negri, qui confrontato alle implicazioni politiche dell’estetica.

Genres: Philosophy, Art, Politics

180 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Antonio Negri was an Italian political philosopher known as one of the most prominent theorists of autonomism, as well as for his co-authorship of Empire with Michael Hardt and his work on the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Born in Padua, Italy, Negri became a professor of political philosophy at the University of Padua, where he taught state and constitutional theory. Negri founded the Potere Operaio (Worker Power) group in 1969 and was a leading member of Autonomia Operaia, and published hugely influential books urging "revolutionary consciousness."
Negri was accused in the late 1970s of various charges including being the mastermind of the left-wing urban guerrilla organization Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse or BR), which was involved in the May 1978 kidnapping and murder of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro. On 7 April 1979, he Negri was arrested and charged with a long list of crimes including the Moro murder. Most charges were dropped quickly, but in 1984 he was still sentenced (in absentia) to 30 years in prison. He was given an additional four years on the charge of being "morally responsible" for the violence of political activists in the 1960s and 1970s. The question of Negri's complicity with left-wing extremism is a controversial subject. He was indicted on a number of charges, including "association and insurrection against the state" (a charge which was later dropped), and sentenced for involvement in two murders.
Negri fled to France where, protected by the Mitterrand doctrine, he taught at the Paris VIII (Vincennes) and the Collège international de philosophie, along with Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. In 1997, after a plea-bargain that reduced his prison time from 30 to 13 years, he returned to Italy to serve the end of his sentence. Many of his most influential books were published while he was behind bars. He hence lived in Venice and Paris with his partner, the French philosopher Judith Revel. He was the father of film director Anna Negri.
Like Deleuze, Negri's preoccupation with Spinoza is well known in contemporary philosophy. Along with Althusser and Deleuze, he has been one of the central figures of a French-inspired neo-Spinozism in continental philosophy of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, that was the second remarkable Spinoza revival in history, after a well-known rediscovery of Spinoza by German thinkers (especially the German Romantics and Idealists) in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Reviews

[michal k-c · Rating 3 out of 5]

i'm always a little skeptical of these correspondence collections that just read like perfectly crafted essays. makes me feel like maybe i'm too casual with the way i correspond with my friends. but anyway this is fine, Negri gets some good lines in here. the stuff about art as liberated labour lands well, and his notion of creation seems to form some kind of accidental synthesis with Rosenzweig's concept of the relationship between creation and revelation.

[Uğur · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is one of the most remarkable books written on the nature and structure of present and future societies. Perhaps the best in the context of its content.

20. Negri and Hardt explained the transformation of the masses, symbolized by the concept of the working class and the people of the century, into a "multitude" by considering both economic, political and social factors.

Any identity, belonging, economic class, color, breed, type, and without reserve; and the working class and the masses of the people is described as confined to the portion actually and quite the very least and now has lost that appeal the validity of this discourse in the broadest sense of the masses of the concept of multiplicity in the world to define, claim that it covers. Based on this, it has been suggested that the world has now turned into a parceled kingdom, and the name of the masses living in this kingdom is multiplicity in its most objective form. That's a pretty consistent claim. Both in terms of saying something new and in terms of fully paying for what has happened.

To explain the book with actual examples, Negri says that the phenomenon of revolution is now 20. it is a phenomenon that has remained in the century. He says that since the forms of production and economic management have changed today, the activity has also changed. Now revolutionary wars have been replaced by popular uprisings, and these actions that spontaneously develop without any upper control around the world reveal how much economic production policies have changed and become subjective, he says. When we look at these spontaneous protest networks that emerged with the gezi park resistance in our country, Negri's rightness emerges.

We are now living under a kingdom. and our actions are completely in response to this. Because every action is the other way of saying "the king is naked".

It is a very full and interesting book in terms of saying new things. I wish you a pleasant reading.

[Pablo Ignacio]

No he pillado la mitad

??/10

[Gerardo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Testo molto interessante perché, fino ad adesso, non ho trovato molti documenti che riflettessero sul postmoderno italiano. Il discorso è tanto più importante se si considera che parte degli scritti raccolti sono stati pubblicati alla fine degli anni '80, quindi in piena fase postmoderna.

Il postmoderno ha cambiato i rapporti tra l'operaio e il mondo del lavoro, introducendo nuove figure lavorative "immateriali", cioè legate a produzioni che non fossero quantificabili, come avveniva in epoca fordista. Insomma, si è passata dalla produzione materiale, fatta di oggetti, del secondario a quella dei servizi del terziario. Oltre a ciò, ogni parte della nostra esistenza è stata inglobata nella logica del capitale, dove tutto perde di consistenza in favore del valore (denaro), il quale è un concetto astratto. La presenza di tale immaterialità, quindi, ha favorito l'emergere dell'astrattismo in arte, visto come un tentativo di dare nuova forma - e quindi esistenza - al mondo astratto nel quale si è immersi.

Negri sottolinea l'importanza del concetto di produzione in arte, cioè quello di riuscire a introdurre nuovi elementi ontologici, in controtendenza con quelle forme artistiche che, al contrario, riconfermano il capitale sottoponendosi alla logica della merce, senza proporre alcuna alternativa.

Inoltre, il mondo postmoderno ha visto l'apparire di nuovi strumenti capaci di cambiare il soggetto, dando inizio a una fase "cyborg" della vita umana. Questi strumenti, appartenendo alla nostra essenza, vanno, però, assorbiti senza lasciarsene dominare, affinché sia abbia il completo dominio su di loro e li si possa sfruttare per produrre un nuovo mondo. L'arte riflette su e viene condizionata da ciò, nella speranza di permettere una rinnovata riappropriazione dello strumento.

Arte è un'eccedenza, qualcosa che va al di là della mera materia o del mero gesto artistico, oltre che dell'artista. Questa eccedenza si esprime nel concetto di multitudo, cioè quel senso di comunità che non è più massa mansueta e bovina, ma unione di uomini attiva e tesa verso l'appropriazione di un proprio senso etico. La moltitudine diventa l'orizzonte verso il quale tende l'arte, nella speranza di affermare una nuova soggettività condivisa: questo per riaffermare con maggiore forza la democrazia, in quanto governo della comunità che si autogestisce, contro una visione dirigistica della politica, condizionata dalle esigenze del capitalo che si mostra come uno stato di natura e non come semplice alternativa. La responsabilità della multitudo sta in questo: formare un nuovo mondo per mettere in evidenza il fatto che il mondo capitalistico non è l'unico possibile, ma solo quello che, attraverso la violenza, cerca di mostrarsi come tale. Infido, poiché, come ammette lo stesso Negri, blandisce l'uomo attraverso il proprio senso del piacere e del bello.

[Cem Erdal · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Art can only exist within a process of liberation. Art, so to speak, is always democratic. Its productive mechanism is democratic in the sense that it creates a linguistic ability, words, colors, and sounds that come together within commonalities and new commonalities. To be free from aesthetic illusion, one must escape loneliness; to build art is to collectively build liberation."

Art is the most important aspect of a human's social existence. Art is the most significant element of being an intellectual individual. With its many branches, it responds to different desires and different emotions. The book "Art and Multitude" by Antonio Negri, consisting of 9 letters he wrote to his friends about how art is being increasingly destroyed by the majority (a majority suffering from ignorance and a lack of emotion) and is about to become a commodity of the capitalist system, is a very important book to me.

TR:
"... Sanat ancak bir özgürleşme sürecinin içerisinde yaşayabilir. Sanat, tabiri caizse, her zaman demokratiktir onun üretici mekanizması, ortaklıklar, yeni ortaklıklar içinde bir araya gelen bir dil yetisi, sözcükler, renkler, sesler üretmesi anlamında demokratiktir. Estetik yanılsamadan kurtulmak için yalnızlıktan kaçmak gerekir; sanat inşa etmek için, kolektif olarak özgürleşmeyi inşa etmektir."

Sanat, insanın sosyal bir varlık oluşunun en önemlisidir. Entelektüel birey olmanın en önemli unsurudur sanat. İçerisinde barındırdığı birçok kollarla, farklı isteklere, farklı duygulara cevap olur. Antonio Negri, sanatın giderek çoğunluk tarafından (cahil ve duygu eksikliğinden mustarip çoğunluk) yok edilmeye ve kapitalist düzenin birer metası olmaya yüz tutması ile ilgili dostlarına yazdığı 9 mektuptan oluşan "Sanat ve Çokluk" adlı kitap benim için oldukça önemli bir kitap.

[Laçin Tutalar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Started this book during 2015, in the middle of a fieldwork with artists. At the time, it was cloudy to read this, while I could anticipate a lot of material to be useful to my understanding. More than two years later, here I am, amorous to the way Negri wrote about collective. It IS all clear now - even though some of it still vaguely makes sense. The last letter was added years later, and includes a helpful scheme of the art since late 19th century. Remember to embrace your monsters, too.

[Judy Chicago fork · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lamentablemente mi correspondencia (mensajes de whatsapp de 5 líneas máximo), nunca podrá equipararse a la de mis teóricos preferidos porque no tengo 9 amigxs que quieran leer análisis críticos no solicitados.

[Monokl Kitap · Rating 5 out of 5]

Negri, sanatı ve sanatın çokluğunun kapitalizme açılan kapısını inceliyor.

[Comisariarte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mencanta, Negri reflexiona en varias cartas sobre el arte. La carta a su amigo Raúl es top y sirve mucho como fuente para hablar sobre el concepto del cuerpo 💕

[Suran · Rating 1 out of 5]

من هیچی نفهمیدم و ولش کردم