#virno

... language is pre-individual; it is the historical-natural language shared by all speakers of a certain community. Language belongs to everybody and to nobody. Also in the case of language, there is not an individual 'I' but a 'one': 'one' speaks. The use of the spoken word is, at first, something 'inter-psychic,' social, public. A 'private language' does not exist—in any individual case, an even less in the case of an infant. In this respect one comprehends the full extent of the concept of 'public intellect' or 'general intellect.' Language, however, unlike sensory perception, is a pre-individual sphere within which is rooted the process of individuation. The ontogenesis, that is, 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. This process, in my opinion, takes place when the child understands the act of 'parole' does not exclusively depend on the determined 'langue' (which in many respects resembles an amniotic fluid or an anonymous zoological environment): rather, it stands in relation also to a generic 'faculty' for speaking, to an indeterminate 'capacity' for saying things (which is never resolved in one historical-natural language or another). The progressive clarification of the relation between 'faculty' (or capacity) for speaking and the particular act of 'parole': this is what enables us to surpass the pre-individual character of historical-natural language, pressing for the individuation of the speaker. In fact, while language belongs to everybody and to nobody, the passage from the pure and simple ability to say something to particular contingent utterance determines the space of an individual's notion of 'my own.'

Incidentally, this explains, in my opinion, the crisis of politics, the sense of scorn surrounding political praxis today, the disrepute into which action has fallen. In fact, political action now seems, in a disastrous way, like some superfluous duplication of the experience of labor, since the latter experience, even if in a deformed and despotic manner, has subsumed into itself certain structural characteristics of political action. The sphere of politics, in the strictest sense of the word, follows closely the procedures and stylistic elements which define the current state of labor; but let us note: it follows them closely while offering a poorer, cruder and more simplistic version of these procedures and stylistic elements. Politics offers a network of communication and a cognitive content of a more wretched variety than what is carried out in the current productive process. While less complex than labor and yet too similar to it, political action seems, all the same, like something not very desirable at all. The inclusion of certain structural features of political praxis in contemporary production helps us to understand why the post-Ford multitude might be seen, today, as a de-politicized multitude. There is already too much politics in the world of wage labor (in as much as it is wage labor) in order for politics as such to continue to enjoy an autonomous dignity.

Labor and non-labor develop an identical form of productivity, based on the exercise of generic human faculties: language, memory, sociability, ethical and aesthetic inclinations, the capacity for abstraction and learning. From the point of view of 'what' is done and 'how' it is done, there is no substantial difference between employment and unemployment. It could be said that: unemployment is non-remunerated labor and labor, in turn, is remunerated unemployment. Working endlessly can be justified with good reasons, and working less and less frequently can be equally justified. These paradoxical formulas, contradicting each other, when put together demonstrate how social time has come unhinged. The old distinction between 'labor' and 'non-labor' ends up in the distinction between remunerated life and non-remunerated life. The border between these two lives is arbitrary, changeable, subject to political decision making.

[The notion of multitude], the polar opposite of that of 'people,' is defined by a complex of breaks, landslides, and innovations which I have tried to point out. Let me site some of them here, in no particular order: the life  of the stranger ('bios xenikos') being experienced as an ordinary condition; the prevalence of 'common places' in discourse over 'special' places; the publicness of the intellect as much an apotropaic device as a pillar of social production; activity without end product (that is, virtuosity); the centrality of the principle of individuation; the relation with the possible in as much as it is possible (opportunism); the hypertrophic development of the non-referential aspects of language (idle talk).

Virno and the three spheres

Utopic longing as grief

The joke is an innovative action that decrees the state of exception. On a par with all other innovative actions, the joke also rises up from the rule to ‘the common behavior of mankind.’ Nevertheless, in the case of the joke it is necessary to understand this last notion in a more articulated fashion. We have said that ‘the common behavior of mankind’ is equivalent, roughly, to those fundamental practices that Wittgenstein calls the ‘natural history’ of our species: commanding, interrogating, recounting, elaborating hypotheses, etc. This is true, but it is not the whole story. The regularity preceding the rules consists, in the first place, of the relationship between nonlinguistic drives and verbal behaviors. The regularity does not derive from these drives, but neither can it be reduced to the repeated use of certain words: Instead, it becomes one with the conversion of the drives into words. What counts is this stitching together as such; this is the precise point in which the language grafts itself on to instinctual reactions and reorganizes them. What is common to every life, above all, is the passage from the cry of pain to the phrases in which one expresses one's own suffering; the passage from silent sexual desire to its articulation in clausal form; the passage from perceptive motor imagination to the metaphors and the metonymies that mold it from top to bottom. The ‘normal everyday frame of life’ is, above all, this threshold: not simply that which follows it. And it is to this threshold that jokes retrace their steps.