Exit?...No Exit!

I would like to examine Virno’s concept of “exit” as he explains it at the end of Day 2. I find the concept very strange, and perhaps easily dismissable. First, here’s what I think he’s saying:

Exit designates a defection (69). People exit from the state, and instead of seizing the means of production (as in the old Marxist model) and setting up a new state they choose otherwise. The examples Virno uses are American pioneers and young Italians in the 70s who decided they’d prefer to work only part-time. While both examples are of physical exits, Virno also shows that another type of exit is possible by disengaging part of the general intellect from labor (see end of post). These examples of specific instances of exit are clearly not feasible: in the first case there is no “free land” to exit to in the 21^st century, and in the second, part-time work is not an option open to anyone who needs to support more than him or herself. In this short final section on exit, what we exit from is vaguely assumed as easily identifiable and what we exit to is left completely untheorized. What would exit mean today? It could conceivably mean geographical exit (there are communes on privately owned land, for example), however this is unlikely. Does it mean defection from the general intellect? And is such a move possible or desirable? If we agree (as I think we did in class) that the general intellect is meant to represent sedimented ways of perceiving, knowing and being-in the world, then what kind of disruption would constitute a defection? The assumption of a schizophrenic subjectivity a la Deleuze and Guattari? Is the recipe to “make yourself a body without organs,” whatever that means? There is some hint of this in Virno’s phrases “exuberance of possibility” and “unrestrained invention.” However, let’s forget for a moment the fact that material constraints would seem to make exit an actual impossibility and think about it for a minute as a choice from the perspective of existentialism as a theoretical possibility. To make a bad pun, I’d like to ask if there can be any such thing as an exitentialism.

Do two bad jokes make one good one? Here’s another, just in case: When theorizing the multitude, we would do well to remember the sentiment captured in the famous dictum from Sartre’s play No Exit: “Hell is other people.” I bring up Sartre for another reason: is there some discrepancy between Virno’s theorization of the general intellect and his claim that the multitude is freely able to choose an “exit strategy”? In order to assume that exit is possible one must assume that the multitude can disrupt the regime of perception (the dominant modes of being in the world) enough so that they can attain escape velocity. As the television show Survivor (and more recently Kid Nation and the game Second Life—see my earlier posts) shows us this is hardly conceivable. In Survivor individuals are ostensibly removed the network of relations that sustain their domination (they exit). However, the world that these people are put into can only make sense to them through the maintenance of certain basic assumptions of capitalist society: private property, gender hierarchy, and a pervasive social Darwinism. What Virno’s assumption amounts to is the other existentialist dictum that “existence precedes essence,” even though Virno seems to say the exact opposite in his theorization of the general intellect (and given his association with French poststructuralist thinkers, we must guess that he would agree that there is no existence without socially essential pre-existing structures). This discrepancy is important for at least two reasons:

1) The assumption that exit can exist as an option for the multitude presupposes that something like existential choice is possible.

2) If the multitude can in fact choose, then it is responsible for the multitude as a whole, and so exit can only be understood as an irresponsible choice.

Sartre explains: “Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism…. Thus, the first effect of existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders. And, when we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men.” If we assume that we are capable of making ourselves then we assume responsibility (does “make yourself a body without organs” echo Sartre’s existentialism?). This is the contradiction between choice and exit that also links existentialism to a politics: if one can choose, one cannot ethically choose exit. Indeed, there is no exit.

Here’s where I get stuck: at the very end of Day 2 Virno writes: “What is at stake, obviously, is not a spatial "frontier," but the surplus of knowledge, communication, virtuosic acting in concert, all presupposed by the publicness of the general intellect. Defection allows for a dramatic, autonomous, and affirmative expression of this surplus; and in this way it impedes the "transfer" of this surplus into the power of state administration, impedes its configuration as productive resource of the capitalistic enterprise” (70). I’m going to lay out what I think this means in a series of statements:

1) Virno writes: “General intellect needs to be understood literally as intellect in general: the faculty and power to think, rather than the works produced by thought.” And “In so far as it organises the production process and the ‘life-world’, the general intellect is certainly an abstraction, but a real one with a material and operative function. However, the general intellect comprises knowledge, information and epistemological paradigms, so it also sharply differs from the real abstractions typical of modernity that embodied the principle of equivalence.” The faculty and power to think, it should be noted, is produced by pre-existing social structures (family, school, work, etc.) and so is not innocent or natural. In fact, it has a character that is specific to the current regime of production.

2) One form of resistance consists in disengaging the faculty of thought from the regime of production. The question I am asking is whether thought would make sense without the structuring principles of thought remaining attached to the social configuration that sustains them?

3) Virno frames the question like this: “Is it possible to split that which today is united, that is, the Intellect (the general intellect) and (wage) Labor, and to unite that which today is divided, that is, Intellect and political Action?” If the answer is “yes,” then this split must manifest a “non-state run public sphere.” This can take two forms: civil disobedience (a para-state public sphere) or exit (a public sphere in the absence of the state).

I am confused about how such a split is possible, because it seems that the general intellect is too tightly tied up with labor to be disengaged from it. I think Virno may realize this and that’s why he only wants to disengage only some “surplus,” but I’m not sure what or where that surplus is. In summation: exit presupposes a more tenuous relation between the general intellect and labor than I am willing to allow at this point, and in any event, the very assumption that such a disengagement is possible necessitates against choosing exit if we accept the existentialist doctrine that choice means responsibility. We can choose civil disobedience as a strategy of resistance because in this case we assume responsibility to everyone.