> I haven't read Virno - I was talking about H&N. As I wrote in my
> review of Empire <http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Empire.html>[URL
> corrected], you'd never know from reading the book that half the
> world's pop lives in the rural Third World, where the principal
> occupation is tilling the soil.
I have to confess the other side of the omission: I haven't read Empire. I did skim a pdf file of it and was not moved to go deeper. My superficial impression of it, incidentally, pretty much agreed with your review, Doug. This is why I was startled to find some remarkably cogent analysis in Virno's work, despite the fact that maybe 90% of what he writes comes across as philosophobabble.
I don't think Virno's observations of present conditions came from torturing the texts of Hobbes and Spinoza relentlessly until they confessed. But I don't think they came from pouring over statistical tables, either. So where did they come from? Maybe praxis. Virno, like Negri, was a political militant and spent three years in prison in the early 1980s for "preventative detention." Not all communications consists of information that is systematically collected, organized and disseminated. In fact, such information may, as Walter Benjamin claimed, represent a couple of steps down the hierarchy of meaningfulness from the "story embedded in the life of the storyteller." As a militant in a particular political formation, in particular struggles informed by a particular analysis, Virno may well have gained insights (from listening critically to stories embedded in the lives of storytellers) that can perhaps be better articulated through reference to the philosophical canon than they can by citation of sociological data. For that matter, some of the stuff I've experienced in my chequered career can be better expressed with photo-montage pop-ups. Dance anyone? Poetry?
To insist that these insights be first corroborated with sociological data is to put the cart before the horse. It is not the prerogative of sociology to judge experience that doesn't conform with the existing data sets, it is the responsibility of sociology to examine these experiences systematically, collecting new data if necessary to do so. No doubt many people are so used to "the way we were taught to do it in school" that they forget that the school exercises are ready-made and work backwards from preconceived conclusions. Not the least renowned in backwardness is economics, which in its most officially-sanctioned version begins always with a mathematical model with which the data are invited to econometrically conform. The comedy of this performance can only be fully appreciated when one knows a bit about the secret life of the data sets themselves. (See, for example, Ian Hacking's "The Taming of Chance" or Marc Linder's "Labor Statistics and Class Struggle.")
As for half the world living in the rural third world where the principal occupation is tilling the soil, Eric Genrich covered that well by noting H&N's comparison that during the so-called "industrial revolution", the principal occupation in the leading industrial nation remained tilling the soil.
The Sandwichman