#Paolo Virno

[dipnotski]

Paolo Virno – Güçsüzlük (2024)

İster bir aşk ilişkisinde ister güvencesiz çalışmaya karşı verilen bir mücadelede olsun, bırakalım gerekeni ve arzu ettiklerimizi yapmayı, maruz kaldığımız şokları karşılamayı bile beceremiyoruz. Eylemin ve söylemin felce uğramasından doğan bir güçsüzlük, kapitalizmde yaşam biçimlerimizin temel özelliği haline geliyor. İşin garibi, bu güçsüzlük kullanılmayan, yani edime dönüşmeyen yetiler ve…

[thelonguepuree]

Most people I spend time with — leftists prone to anxiety and depression — are skeptical of “self-improvement.” Many of us, following the critic Mark Fisher, think that depression reflects an encounter with the harshness of reality, rather than a merely pathological distortion. We definitely want to feel better, but we don’t want to be hijacked by acronyms or worksheets or positive thinking in the process. We try to attribute suffering to crappy world systems rather than personal deficiencies. We find ways to trust that our negative emotions signify something other than our own inadequacy — that they contain a deeply rational response to the world’s irrational injustice. If we can uncover that deeper nugget of rationality, we believe, it might even reveal strategic weaknesses in the slick machinery of capitalism. Left uninterpreted, our feelings grease its gears: as the theorist Paolo Virno suggests, anxiety and insecurity ensure people keep striving to get ahead.

Lily Scherlis, "Skill Issues: Dialectical Behavior Therapy and Its Discontents" (x)

[oo111111]

Excerpt from Paolo Virno's The Idea of the World

[polaroidblog]

Sostanza di cose sperate. Voci e storie dal processo 7 aprile

di Massimo e Ivan Carozzi

https://www.raiplaysound.it/playlist/sostanzadicosesperatevociestoriedalprocesso7aprile

Il 7 aprile 1979, un'imponente operazione di polizia porta all'arresto di decine e decine di militanti dell'area di Autonomia Operaia. Il più noto è il professor Antonio Negri, docente di Dottrina dello Stato all'Università di Padova. L'accusa del magistrato Pietro Calogero desta scalpore. Secondo Calogero, dietro i tanti episodi di illegalità e terrorismo diffuso dell'Italia degli anni Settanta - dall'esproprio nel supermercato al sequestro Moro - ci sarebbe la regia di un gruppo ristretto, che manovra le tante sigle del mondo extraparlamentare e i gruppi clandestini che praticano la lotta armata. Per la prima volta nella storia della Repubblica viene contestato il reato di «insurrezione armata contro i poteri dello Stato». Le voci, i volti e le storie del processo 7 aprile occuperanno per anni le cronache dei giornali e dei tg, eppure oggi se n'è quasi del tutto perduta la memoria. Attraverso gli audio dei processi, interviste e documenti sonori, viene ricostruito il clima di un'epoca insieme alla vicenda di un teorema giudiziario, che se da una parte portò ad accertare molti reati, dall'altra fu responsabile di un abuso dello strumento della carcerazione preventiva e contribuì alla liquidazione di un'opzione politica ed esistenziale, quella «sostanza di cose sperate» evocata in aula dall'imputato Paolo Virno.

documentario alla radio davvero molto bello - come tutto quello che scrive Carozzi - che si chiude con questa canzone incredibile che avevo dimenticato:

[robhorninginternalexile]

LLMs and the end of history

The spectacle is the form that the déjà vu takes, as soon as this becomes an exterior, public form beyond one's own person. The society of the spectacle offers people the 'world's fair' of their own capacity to do, to speak, and to be — but reduced to already-performed actions, already-spoken phrases and already-complete events

From Paolo Virno’s Déjà Vu and the End of History (1999). (Jason Read cites this passage in this post from 2015.)

Analysis of the “end of history” works well as analysis of “generative AI,” because LLMs presuppose a certain completeness in the possible use of language such that everything — all the relations between words and concepts — appears as always already given and can simply be reiterated as necessary. 

When Virno refers to the fatalism that stems from the bad déjà vu in which everything is repetition, it is a warning against “false recognition” and of succumbing to the “end of history” thesis (a “mediocre ideology”) just as historicity itself has become explicitly apparent. 

With LLMs and generative AI, the “end of history” is basically built into how the models work, and déjà vu is outsourced to them. The models perform and instantiate the nihilistic “end of history” for us to the degree that we accept their output as legitimate, see its ordering of past data as fixed and binding. As Virno puts it, it means to confuse “past-form” (pastness in general or in the abstract) with “past fact” (collected data):

We know that the past-form (or past-in-general) is language, disposition, the condition of possibility. As such, to confuse the past-form for a past fact means to conceive the language faculty — the mere capacity-to-speak — as the already-spoken word, the mass of actually-performed utterances. The faculty is equated to a single performance, or better, to the previous performance which appears as the prototype of the one now being performed. The condition of possibility of an event is represented as another event, its outdated original version. The disposition towards pleasure is totally identified with the pleasures already enjoyed, the intellect coincides with a series of particular understandings, labour-power becomes indistinguishable from labour that has been carried out, and only the already-loved is loveable.

The consequence of this kind of misrecognition is to become “spectators of our very own potential-to-be” and to fall into “predetermined behavior patterns,” in which we take language “for an immense reservoir of already-spoken words, to be repeated and repeated again in correspondence with environmental stimuli” —which sounds like all the various forms of autocomplete we currently contest with.

But it is important to highlight that this is a misrecognition, that more and more totalizing forms of autocomplete are not a destiny. The point is not to conflate the ideology of the “end of history” (everything is doomed to be a repeat of the already existing) with a critique of it by saying AI will bring the end of history to pass. As Virno suggests, “The excess of memory does not induce lethargy and resignation, but on the contrary guarantees the most intense alacrity.” Nothing in the conditions of “information overload” necessitates LLMs and other algorithmic “solutions.”

The point instead is to show how LLMs can facilitate “false recognition” working against “the means to attain the possibility of a fully historical existence.” The “end of history” is what LLMs promise (it is another expression of their supposed efficiency); pointing that out risks advertising them rather than critiquing them.

[hetesiya]

Çokluk nosyonu ile liberal düşünce arasında bir ortaklık var gibi görünür, çünkü insanlara değer verir, ama aynı zamanda kendinden ondan radikal bir şekilde ayrılır, çünkü bu kişisellikten evrenselden, türselden, bireyin-öncesinden yayılan bir bireyselleşme sürecinin nihai ürünüdür.

Paolo Virno

[marcogiovenale]

paolo virno: da leggere, come sempre

https://www.machina-deriveapprodi.com/post/l-ambivalenza-di-tre-sentimenti-del-disincanto

[diagenetic-nostalgic]

Paolo Virno, Do you remember the counterrevolution?

Hannah Arendt: "a future at our backs"

[stuartelden]

Paolo Virno, The Idea of World: Public Intellect and Use of Life, translated by Lorenzo Chiesa - Seagull Books, September 2022

Paolo Virno, The Idea of World: Public Intellect and Use of Life, translated by Lorenzo Chiesa – Seagull Books, September 2022

Paolo Virno, The Idea of World: Public Intellect and Use of Life, translated by Lorenzo Chiesa – Seagull Books, September 2022 A philosophical exploration of what capitalistic societies truly mean for the individual. A short vade mecum for unrepentant materialism, The Idea of World collects three essays by Italian philosopher Paulo Virno that are intricately wrapped around one another. The first…

[nierreplicantver122474487239]

Jakob excels at the sovereign submissiveness of his at once subordinate and superior performance, and holds up its principles even when he is offered special treatment by Lisa and her brother. Claudia Liebrand has described this as follows: “Sowohl Ohnmacht als auch Versagung verlieren für Jakob also ihren Schrecken, weil sie von ihm selbst induziert sind, weil es sich nurmehr um Effekte einer Simulation, einer Inszenierung, eines Spiels handelt, dessen Regeln er bestimmt” (Both powerlessness and frustration lose their fearfulness for Jakob, because he has induced them in himself, they are nothing more than the effects of a simulation, a theatrical moment, a game whose rules he determines). He becomes a virtuoso at conducting his own play—in the sense of game and performance—of absolute servitude. This simultaneous debasement and empowerment of the subject is reflected in the perpetual shifting of Jakob’s feelings between smallness and grandeur, impotence and omnipotence, obedience and transgression. After the principal’s declaration of love for his pupil towards the end of the novel, it is Jakob who insists on maintaining the hierarchical relationship. He enjoys being thrown out of Herr Benjamenta’s office, and indulges in self-assured laughter: “Wenn ich so lache, nun, dann steht nichts mehr über mir. Dann bin ich etwas an Umfassen und Beherrschen nicht zu Überbietendes. Ich bin in solchen Momenten einfach groß” (When I laugh like this, nothing stands higher above me. Then I am something that can't be surpassed by surrounding and conquering me. In such moments I am simply magnificent). Herr Benjamenta fulfills his assignments in turn by enacting the roles of both “Riese” (giant) and “entthronter Herrscher” (ruler without a throne). Paolo Virno recently introduced the idea of virtuosity as “an extremely modern servitude” , as a way to explain the performative quality of those non-material skills and services that shape post-industrial information society. Detaching the concept of virtuosity from its more common context in the performing arts and tracing its history from Aristotle via Marx to Hannah Arendt, he detects both its inherent potential of non-productive service labor and its capacity for representing a type of political agency born out of the excellence of a leader figure. Virno’s rethinking of the concept aims to restore this political agency to the “general intellect” of today’s virtuosic service providers, and encourage their “exodus” from stifling corporate structures. The double-edged movement of exodus as both liberating and traumatic departure will indeed inflect the present readings of Walser and Sebald. However, while Virno’s intriguing notion of servile virtuosity can function as a point of departure for reconsidering Jakob von Gunten, the virtuosic servants of Walser’s novel follow their own course. What Walser rehearses, in the first instance, is the subversive drive of virtuosity within, rather than after servitude. Walser’s Jakob does not want to abandon servility; he refines and mocks its rules and rituals, which can only be done if those very rules and rituals are firmly in place.

Lucia Ruprecht (Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge), Virtuoso Servitude and (De)Mobilization in Robert Walser, W. G. Sebald, and the Brothers Quay (trans. me </3)

[literaturha]

The elements of this language are entities called patterns. —Christopher Alexander

. . . the artist should know the Alphabet by heart, as well as the figures, definitions, and rules, along with the arrangement of the table. —Ramon Llull

. . . the developmental phases of the individual human being, consists in fact of the passage from language as public or inter-psychic experience to language as singularizing and intra-psychic experience. —Paolo Virno

I’m going to play a little number now of the slower type to give you an idea of the slower type of jazz music. You can apply to any type of tune; it depends only upon your ability for transformation. —Jelly Roll Morton

[maxksx]

Nothing is less passive than the act of fleeing, of exiting. Defection modifies the conditions within which the struggle takes place, rather than presupposing those conditions to be an unalterable horizon; it modifies the context within which a problem has arisen, rather than facing this problem by opting for one or the other of the provided alternatives. In short, exit consists of unrestrained invention which alters the rules of the game and throws the adversary completely off balance.

[story-on-stage]

There is none so poor as the one who sees her or his own ability to relate to the ‘presence of others,’ or her or his own possession of language, reduced to waged labor.

Paolo Virno

[oo111111]

Excerpt from Paolo Virno's The Idea of the World

[widgernotes]

Where is that one can find unconditional refuge? Kant answers: in the moral ‘I,’ since it is precisely there that one finds something of the non-contingent, or of the realm above the mundane. The transcendent moral law protects my person in an absolute way, since it places the value which is due to it above finite existence.

Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude

[anarchy101]

A revolution on a world scale will take a very long time. But it is also possible to recognize that it is already starting to happen. The easiest way to get our minds around it is to stop thinking about revolution as a thing — “the” revolution, the great cataclysmic break—and instead ask “what is revolutionary action?”

We could then suggest: revolutionary action is any collective action which rejects, and therefore confronts, some form of power or domination and in doing so, reconstitutes social relations—even within the collectivity—in that light. Revolutionary action does not necessarily have to aim to topple governments.

Attempts to create autonomous communities in the face of power (using Castoriadis’ definition here: ones that constitute themselves, collectively make their own rules or principles of operation, and continually reexamine them), would, for instance, be almost by definition revolutionary acts. And history shows us that the continual accumulation of such acts can change (almost) everything.

Normally, when you challenge the conventional wisdom—that the current economic and political system is the only possible one—the first reaction you are likely to get is a demand for a detailed architectural blueprint of how an alternative system would work, down to the nature of its financial instruments, energy supplies, and policies of sewer maintenance. Next, you are likely to be asked for a detailed program of how this system will be brought into existence. Historically, this is ridiculous. When has social change ever happened according to someone’s blueprint? It’s not as if a small circle of visionaries in Renaissance Florence conceived of something they called “capitalism,” figured out the details of how the stock exchange and factories would someday work, and then put in place a program to bring their visions into reality. In fact, the idea is so absurd we might well ask ourselves how it ever occurred to us to imagine this is how change happens to begin.

The theory of exodus proposes that the most effective way of opposing capitalism and the liberal state is not through direct confrontation but by means of what Paolo Virno has called “engaged withdrawal,”mass defection by those wishing to create new forms of community. One need only glance at the historical record to confirm that most successful forms of popular resistance have taken precisely this form. They have not involved challenging power head on (this usually leads to being slaughtered, or if not, turning into some—often even uglier—variant of the very thing one first challenged) but from one or another strategy of slipping away from its grasp, from flight, desertion, the founding of new communities.

―      David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology