I am no fan of Antonio Negri. But read this. An interview with Negri by Johann Hari. It reminds me, distantly, of Andrew Marr’s interview with Noam Chomsky - in each case a constitutional phrase-maker & professional Middle-Brow guilelessly locks horns with an actual thinker. And so, presented for our edification: the embarrassing spectacle of an interviewer who combines a complete ignorance of his interviewee’s work with a complete absence of intellectual humility; someone who evidently thinks that anything which can’t be immediately paraphrased into journalese must be pretentious or boring; someone who giggles when confronted with a Concept, as if it were a minor indiscretion; someone who would prefer to salute a ready made idea in passing rather than unpick a tightly woven argument; someone who spends the best part of an entire article – note, an interview with a respected thinker – gossiping about the circumstantial details of the interview itself whilst assiduously forgetting to engage with a single substantial Idea. But, perhaps most depressingly, someone who knows that his easy sneers at ‘the intellectual’ (the full armoury of stereotypes are indeed on display) will receive ready and immediate echo among his readership – and perhaps, beyond that, within the culture at large. There is a pre-existing field of presuppositions and ready-made images, into which Hari’s piece painlessly inserts itself, so lending it the brief illusion of substance. And without this field, Hari’s interview would stand revealed for what it is – a hollow and inconsequential exhibit in the Museum of Ideology.
(For some critical but informed thoughts on Negri, see here)
19/8: The Virtual Stoa has some interesting observations on Hari's methods. Also, while I'm on the subject, the closing remarks of the original Hari article:
So, this is where revolutionary Marxism comes to die. It has been reduced to an obscure parlour game for ageing bourgeois nostalgics, played out a few feet from Buckingham Palace by an old terrorist who needs us to forget.
- where, ingeniously, the chance geographical location of the Institute of Contemprary Arts serves as a whole argument in itself.
19/8 Hat tip to Lenin's Tomb for a transcript of the Chomsky-Marr interview mentioned above.