The Poor
Excerpt from Empire
In each and every historical period a social subject that is ever-present and
everywhere the same is identified, often negatively but nonetheless urgently,
around a common living form. This form is not that of the powerful and
the rich: they are merely partial and localized figures, quantitate signatae.
The only non-localizable ‘‘common name’’ of pure difference in all eras is
that of the poor. The poor is destitute, excluded, repressed, exploited-and
yet living! It is the common denominator of life, the foundation of the
multitude. It is strange, but also illuminating, that postmodernist authors
seldom adopt this figure in their theorizing. It is strange because the poor
is in a certain respect an eternal postmodern figure: the figure of a transversal,
omnipresent, different, mobile subject; the testament to the irrepressible
aleatory character of existence.
This common name, the poor, is also the foundation of every possibility
of humanity. As Niccolo` Machiavelli pointed out, in the ‘‘return to beginnings’’
that characterizes the revolutionary phase of the religions and ideologies of modernity, the poor is almost always seen to have a prophetic capacity:
not only is the poor in the world, but the poor itself is the very possibility
of the world. Only the poor lives radically the actual and present being, in
destitution and suffering, and thus only the poor has the ability to renew
being. The divinity of the multitude of the poor does not point to any
transcendence. On the contrary, here and only here in this world, in the
existence of the poor, is the field of immanence presented, confirmed, consolidated,
and opened. The poor is god on earth.
Today there is not even the illusion of a transcendent God. The poor
has dissolved that image and recuperated its power. Long ago modernity
was inaugurated with Rabelais’s laugh, with the realistic supremacy of the
belly of the poor, with a poetics that expresses all that there is in destitute
humanity ‘‘from the belt on down.’’ Later, through the processes of primitive
accumulation, the proletariat emerged as a collective subject that could express
itself in materiality and immanence, a multitude of poor that not only
prophesied but produced, and that thus opened possibilities that were not
virtual but concrete. Finally today, in the biopolitical regimes of production
and in the processes of postmodernization, the poor is a subjugated, exploited
figure, but nonetheless a figure of production. This is where the novelty
lies. Everywhere today, at the basis of the concept and the common name
of the poor, there is a relationship of production. Why are the postmodernists
unable to read this passage? They tell us that a regime of transversal linguistic
relations of production has entered into the unified and abstract universe of
value. But who is the subject that produces ‘‘transversally,’’ who gives a
creative meaning to language-who if not the poor, who are subjugated
and desiring, impoverished and powerful, always more powerful? Here,
within this reign of global production, the poor is distinguished no longer
only by its prophetic capacity but also by its indispensable presence in the
production of a common wealth, always more exploited and always more
closely indexed to the wages of rule. The poor itself is power. There is
World Poverty, but there is above all World Possibility, and only the poor
is capable of this.
Vogelfrei, ‘‘bird free,’’ is the term Marx used to describe the proletariat,
which at the beginning of modernity in the processes of primitive
accumulation was freed twice over: in the first place, it was freed from being
the property of the master (that is, freed from servitude); and in the second
place, it was ‘‘freed’’ from the means of production, separated from the soil,
with nothing to sell but its own labor power. In this sense, the proletariat
was forced to become the pure possibility of wealth. The dominant stream
of the Marxist tradition, however, has always hated the poor, precisely for
their being ‘‘free as birds,’’ for being immune to the discipline of the factory
and the discipline necessary for the construction of socialism. Consider how,
when in the early 1950s Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini set the
poor to fly away on broomsticks at the end of their beautiful film Miracle
in Milan, they were so violently denounced for utopianism by the spokesmen
of socialist realism.
The Vogelfrei is an angel or an intractable demon. And here, after
so many attempts to transform the poor into proletarians and proletarians
into a liberation army (the idea of army weighed heavily on that of liberation),
once again in postmodernity emerges in the blinding light of clear day the
multitude, the common name of the poor. It comes out fully in the open
because in postmodernity the subjugated has absorbed the exploited. In
other words, the poor, every poor person, the multitude of poor people, have
eaten up and digested the multitude of proletarians. By that fact itself the
poor have become productive. Even the prostituted body, the destitute person,
the hunger of the multitude-all forms of the poor have become productive.
And the poor have therefore become ever more important: the life of the
poor invests the planet and envelops it with its desire for creativity and
freedom. The poor is the condition of every production.
The story goes that at the root of the postmodernist sensibility and
the construction of the concept of postmodernism are those French socialist
philosophers who in their youth celebrated factory discipline and the shining
horizons of real socialism, but who became repentant after the crisis of 1968
and gave up, proclaiming the futility of the pretense of communism to
reappropriate social wealth. Today these same philosophers cynically deconstruct,
banalize, and laugh at every social struggle that contests the universal
triumph of exchange value. The media and the culture of the media tell
us that those philosophers are the ones who recognized this new era of the
world, but that is not true. The discovery of postmodernity consisted in the
reproposition of the poor at the center of the political and productive terrain.
What was really prophetic was the poor, bird-free laugh of Charlie Chaplin
when, free from any utopian illusions and above all from any discipline
of liberation, he interpreted the ‘‘modern times’’ of poverty, but at the same
time linked the name of the poor to that of life, a liberated life and a
liberated productivity.
In each and every historical period a social subject that is ever-present and
everywhere the same is identified, often negatively but nonetheless urgently,
around a common living form. This form is not that of the powerful and
the rich: they are merely partial and localized figures, quantitate signatae.
The only non-localizable ‘‘common name’’ of pure difference in all eras is
that of the poor. The poor is destitute, excluded, repressed, exploited-and
yet living! It is the common denominator of life, the foundation of the
multitude. It is strange, but also illuminating, that postmodernist authors
seldom adopt this figure in their theorizing. It is strange because the poor
is in a certain respect an eternal postmodern figure: the figure of a transversal,
omnipresent, different, mobile subject; the testament to the irrepressible
aleatory character of existence.
This common name, the poor, is also the foundation of every possibility
of humanity. As Niccolo` Machiavelli pointed out, in the ‘‘return to beginnings’’
that characterizes the revolutionary phase of the religions and ideologies of modernity, the poor is almost always seen to have a prophetic capacity:
not only is the poor in the world, but the poor itself is the very possibility
of the world. Only the poor lives radically the actual and present being, in
destitution and suffering, and thus only the poor has the ability to renew
being. The divinity of the multitude of the poor does not point to any
transcendence. On the contrary, here and only here in this world, in the
existence of the poor, is the field of immanence presented, confirmed, consolidated,
and opened. The poor is god on earth.
Today there is not even the illusion of a transcendent God. The poor
has dissolved that image and recuperated its power. Long ago modernity
was inaugurated with Rabelais’s laugh, with the realistic supremacy of the
belly of the poor, with a poetics that expresses all that there is in destitute
humanity ‘‘from the belt on down.’’ Later, through the processes of primitive
accumulation, the proletariat emerged as a collective subject that could express
itself in materiality and immanence, a multitude of poor that not only
prophesied but produced, and that thus opened possibilities that were not
virtual but concrete. Finally today, in the biopolitical regimes of production
and in the processes of postmodernization, the poor is a subjugated, exploited
figure, but nonetheless a figure of production. This is where the novelty
lies. Everywhere today, at the basis of the concept and the common name
of the poor, there is a relationship of production. Why are the postmodernists
unable to read this passage? They tell us that a regime of transversal linguistic
relations of production has entered into the unified and abstract universe of
value. But who is the subject that produces ‘‘transversally,’’ who gives a
creative meaning to language-who if not the poor, who are subjugated
and desiring, impoverished and powerful, always more powerful? Here,
within this reign of global production, the poor is distinguished no longer
only by its prophetic capacity but also by its indispensable presence in the
production of a common wealth, always more exploited and always more
closely indexed to the wages of rule. The poor itself is power. There is
World Poverty, but there is above all World Possibility, and only the poor
is capable of this.
Vogelfrei, ‘‘bird free,’’ is the term Marx used to describe the proletariat,
which at the beginning of modernity in the processes of primitive
accumulation was freed twice over: in the first place, it was freed from being
the property of the master (that is, freed from servitude); and in the second
place, it was ‘‘freed’’ from the means of production, separated from the soil,
with nothing to sell but its own labor power. In this sense, the proletariat
was forced to become the pure possibility of wealth. The dominant stream
of the Marxist tradition, however, has always hated the poor, precisely for
their being ‘‘free as birds,’’ for being immune to the discipline of the factory
and the discipline necessary for the construction of socialism. Consider how,
when in the early 1950s Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini set the
poor to fly away on broomsticks at the end of their beautiful film Miracle
in Milan, they were so violently denounced for utopianism by the spokesmen
of socialist realism.
The Vogelfrei is an angel or an intractable demon. And here, after
so many attempts to transform the poor into proletarians and proletarians
into a liberation army (the idea of army weighed heavily on that of liberation),
once again in postmodernity emerges in the blinding light of clear day the
multitude, the common name of the poor. It comes out fully in the open
because in postmodernity the subjugated has absorbed the exploited. In
other words, the poor, every poor person, the multitude of poor people, have
eaten up and digested the multitude of proletarians. By that fact itself the
poor have become productive. Even the prostituted body, the destitute person,
the hunger of the multitude-all forms of the poor have become productive.
And the poor have therefore become ever more important: the life of the
poor invests the planet and envelops it with its desire for creativity and
freedom. The poor is the condition of every production.
The story goes that at the root of the postmodernist sensibility and
the construction of the concept of postmodernism are those French socialist
philosophers who in their youth celebrated factory discipline and the shining
horizons of real socialism, but who became repentant after the crisis of 1968
and gave up, proclaiming the futility of the pretense of communism to
reappropriate social wealth. Today these same philosophers cynically deconstruct,
banalize, and laugh at every social struggle that contests the universal
triumph of exchange value. The media and the culture of the media tell
us that those philosophers are the ones who recognized this new era of the
world, but that is not true. The discovery of postmodernity consisted in the
reproposition of the poor at the center of the political and productive terrain.
What was really prophetic was the poor, bird-free laugh of Charlie Chaplin
when, free from any utopian illusions and above all from any discipline
of liberation, he interpreted the ‘‘modern times’’ of poverty, but at the same
time linked the name of the poor to that of life, a liberated life and a
liberated productivity.