‘machinic’ as Guattari would say, is increasingly entering the constitu-
tion of the communicative relations and even our corporeal experi-
ence. It is at this point that American thought, which knows the
machinic much better both in theory and practice, understands that
we have to rethink the notion of subjectivity. You should also keep in
mind that Hegel, who had an essential role in German and Italian
thought, is quite a mystery in America. He’s either unknown or misun-
derstood. That is, the concept of totality escapes American pragmatist
thought, and this makes American thought much more ‘virginal’ than
the Italian or the German one with respect to the rethinking of subjec-
tivity. And then you have more contingent, political reasons, but I
really think that there is a fundamental philosophical issue at stake:
technological and anthropological mutations are forcing us to rethink
subjectivity. The subject is no longer a historical or a natural datum,
but the product of a psychological and social process. This is what the
French post-structuralists had discovered ...GM:But this is also what the ‘workerist’ thinkers had discovered and what
marks the experience of Autonomia Operaia, which saw politics much more
in the field of immediacy than in the Marxist project, which is oriented
toward the long term and is historicist in nature. It was a practice of ‘let us
do politics for today, not for tomorrow’.Bifo:Yes, and here there are some considerations to be undertaken
about the strictly political timeliness of that theoretical and practical
experience, mostly the one of the late Seventies – from 1977 on, let’s
say – when the historicist framework, typical of classical, dialectical
communist ideology, ‘We are fighting for the Revolution’, is fading
away ...GM:We are fighing for the society of the future ...Bifo:For the constitution of the totality of the Aufhebung, for the total-
ity of overcoming. When this horizon starts disappearing because of
contingent, political reasons and also for deep, philosophical ones,
with the deterioration of the dialectical framework, then the encounter
with American pragmatism becomes much easier. In fact, the experi-
ence of the nineteenth-century European working movements, which
was German, Hegelian in nature, always had great difficulty in under-
standing the American workers’ movement. The American movement
was populated by strange, mad individualists; people like the Wobblies148 Thought, Friendship and Visionary Cartography9780230_221192_14_inte.pdf 10/3/08 11:37 AM Page 148