Tom,
Are you saying "idle hands are Cupid's workshop" ?
Charles
^^^^^^
Tom Walker :
As long as there seems to be a somewhat engaged thread developing on
this multitude business, I'll mention my own misgivings about Virno. I
had a hard time at first putting my finger on where the airy abstraction
comes from that constitutes the filler between his occasional very
constructive and clear insights. I'm too charitable to just dismiss such
abstrusenss out of hand as either the writer's arrogance or my own lack
of culture. My crickets finally gave me a clue. I breed and raise
crickets to feed to my son's gecko. Friday night, the first of the
current cohort of crickets began to chirp. Crickets specialize it two
activities: feeding and breeding. Chirping is associated with the latter.
Now, Virno is writing about emotions and about socialization outside of
work but nowhere in the two essays and a book that I've read does he
address the (Freudian) theme of eros and its repression and
sublimation. This absence of eros is even more remarkable when one
considers that Marcuse's _Eros and Civilization_ had already half a
century ago raised the spectre of "repressive desublimation", easily a
counterpart for Virno's "communism of capital" and Eros and Civilization
prospectively posed many of the same questions about the "future" of
work that Virno is examining retrospectively.
The Sandwichman