T. Negri, On Rem Koolhaas, 2009 | #kamworkshops2011

I really do not know what the architects trapped in the grip of the crisis of modernity can do. It seems to me that they need to decide how to interpret the relation between inclusion and disjuncture, the productive relation that extends between metropolis and multitude. Will it be possible to open up the chance for encounter and struggles in the metropolis? Certainly enclosures of resistance and of spaces for utopia are not desirable. Beyond the hypocritical transparency of the hypermodern, beyond the illusion that urban spaces can be gentrified by Tony Blair’s ‘creative classes’ (here Junkspace really does become a weapon of demystification and struggle), we need to free new forms of life and search for new structures of community that tend towards exodus. I almost laugh when my closest comrades talk about alternatives in terms of communes, self-managed gardens and city allotments, multifunctional squats, cultural and political ateliers, enterprises of a common Bildung. The cynical realism of the postmodern has earned my criticism but, starting from its realism and under no illusion that the city is entrusted to the exercise of biopower, I ask myself what it would mean to return the metropolis to biopolitical production. In the framework of Bigness, not of craftsmanship, but of the General Intellect, perhaps we only need to start talking about communism and democracy again.

From Negri A. 2009. “On Rem Koolhaas”. Radical Philosophy.no. 154: 48-50.