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Paolo Virno's A Grammar of the Multitude is a short book, but it casts a very long shadow. Behind it looms the entire history of the labor movement and its heretical wing, Italian "workerism" (operaismo), which rethought Marxism in light of the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. For the most part, though, it looks forward. Abstract intelligence and immaterial signs have become the major productive force in the "post-Fordist" economy we are living in and they are deeply affecting contemporary structures and mentalities. Virno's essay examines the increased mobility and versatility of the new labor force whose work-time now virtually extends to their entire life. The "multitude" is the kind of subjective configuration that this radical change is liberating, raising the political question of what we are capable of.
Operaismo (workerism) has a paradoxical relation to traditional Marxism and to the official labor movement because it refuses to consider work as the defining factor of human life. Marxist analysis assumes that what makes work alienating is capitalist exploitation, but operaists realized that it is rather the reduction of life to work. Paradoxically, "workerists" are against work, against the socialist ethics that used to exalt its dignity. They don't want to re-appropriate work ("take over the means of production") but reduce it. Trade unions or parties are concerned about wages and working conditions. They don't fight to change the workers' lot, at best they make it more tolerable. Workerists pressed for the reduction of labor time and the transformation of production through the application of technical knowledge and socialized intelligence.
In the mid-30s the leftist philosopher Simone Weil
experienced the
appalling abjection of the assembly line first hand by enlisting in a
factory. She wondered whether Lenin or Stalin could ever have set foot
in a work
Ideologically, Operaism was made possible by the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956, which revealed the true nature of bureaucratic socialism. To young Italian intellectuals on the left of the left (among them Toni Negri and Mario Tronti) it became clear that the Soviet Union wasn't the Workers' Country, but a totalitarian form of capitalism. Around that time the first large emigration of Italian workers from the impoverished South to the industrial North proved even more unsettling. Instead of submitting to the new system of mass production, young unskilled workers ("mass-workers") bypassed established trade-unions, which privileged skilled workers, and furiously resisted the Ford assembly line. The Operaist movement took off in 1961 after the first massive labor confrontation in Turin. Quaderni Rossi ("Red Notebooks"), its first publication, analyzed the impact the young mass workers had on the labor force and the new "class composition" that emerged from recent capitalist transformations. Classe Operaia ("Working Class"), published in 1964, formulated a new political strategy, the refusal of work, challenging capital to develop its productive forces with new technology. This "strategy of refusal" (a seminal essay by Mario Tronti) was applied "inside" capitalist development, but "against it." It anticipated the post-68 analysis of capital by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze in Anti-Oedipus, 1972, and brought Italian social thinkers and post- Structuralist French philosophers together in the mid-70s. What mass-workers objected to most was the transfer of human knowledge to the machines, reducing life to "dead labor." There was an existential dimension there, but active and creative. Their effort to change labor conditions was unknown to classical Marxism, mostly preoccupied with mechanisms of oppression and their effect on the working class.
In Daybreak, Nietzsche summoned European workers
to "declare that
henceforth as a class they are a human impossibility and not just, as
is customary, a harsh and purposeless establishment." And he exhorted
that "impossible class" to swarm out from the European beehive, "and
with this act of emigration in the grand manner protest against the
machine, against capital, and against the choice with which they are
now threatened, of
Autonomist theory is found in many
places, including the United States, but the movement developed most
powerfully in Italy where the 60s' movement extended well into the
70s. Breaking away from the orthodox and populist Marxism of Antonio
Gramsci, founder of the Italian Communist Party, young Operaist
intellectuals learned from the workers themselves what the reality of
production was. They helped them create their organizations and
confront the system of production head on through strikes and
sabotage. This pragmatic and militant aspect of workerism sets Italian
social thinkers apart. They opposed the hegemony of the Italian
C.P. and Gramsci's strategy of small steps (the "war of position"
within civil society) which led to Eurocommunism and the "historic
compromise" with the governing Christian-Democrats
(conservatives). Operaists were the first to question the centrality
of the proletariat, cornerstone of the entire socialist tradition, and
call for a reevaluation of the categories of class analysis. The
notion of "changing class composition" introduced by Sergio Bologna
allowed them to re-center the revolutionary struggle on the "new
social subject" just emerging at the time both from the factory and
the university.3 The "Troubled
Autumn" of 1969 was marked by the
powerful offensive of mass-workers to obtain equality in
salaries. Various workerist groups joined
The workers' formidable pressure to control the cycle of production met with serious provocations from the secret services and the Christian-Democratic government, starting with the bombing of Piazza Fontana in Milan in 1969. Hastily attributed to the anarchists by the government, it justified an intense police repression of workers' organizations. This "strategy of tension" tore Italy apart and sent shock waves well into the 70s, verging on civil war. It triggered among factory workers in the Fiat factories the creation of underground terrorist groups — the "Red Brigades" and "Prima Linea" are the most well-known — targeting leaders of the industry and prominent political figures. The kidnapping of DC President Aldo Moro and his coldblooded execution by the Red Brigades after the government broke off the negotiations, further upset the political balance in Italy.
In 1975 Potere Operaio was replaced by Autonomia, a
large movement involving students, women, young workers and the
unemployed. Their rhizomatic organization embodied every form of
political behavior — anti-hierarchical, anti-dialectical,
anti-representative — anticipated by Operaist thinkers. Autonomia wasn't
any kind of normal political organization. Libertarian,
neo-anarchistic, ideologically open and loosely organized by regions,
it was respectful of political differences. Autonomist groups only
cooperated in common public actions. Experimental and imaginative, the
mass movement was a far cry from the tight terrorist groups taking
"armed struggle" into their hands. In 1977, an autonomist student was
murdered by the fascists in Rome and Autonomia exploded into the
"Movement of 1977."4 It swept the
entire country, taking over the universities in Rome, Palermo and Naples, then in
Florence, Turin
and Finally Bologna. It seemed as if they were about to take over
Italy. What they would have done with it, Piperno recognized recently,
they didn't really know. It was an inauspicious time for the movement
to come of age. Challenged from its far left, the Communist Party used
Moro's murder to eliminate Autonomia. Accused of being a shadow
command for the "armed wing of the proletariat," all the autonomist
leaders, including Negri, were arrested and jailed in April
1979. Others, like Piperno and Scalzone, went into exile (not by their
own choice). Paolo Virno was on the editorial board
Michael Hardt and Toni Negri's Empire makes no explicit reference to this period of social and political creativity, and there is a good reason for that. The American Left at the time was siding with Eurocommunism and considered Autonomia with suspicion. And yet the theses Negri defended then were hardly different from those he is developing today. So what has changed? (Paradoxically, the ghostly presence of Autonomia is felt far more strongly in Empire than in A Grammar of the Multitude where Paolo Virno confronts it head on.) The strategy proved enormously successful. The bulk of reviews and critical studies of Empire now far outweigh its own mass (some 500 pages). Unfortunately, few people will realize that the multitude isn't just a philosophical concept lifted from Spinoza — the democracy of the multitude — that it has a history under another name, and has been the object of vibrant collective experiments. They will never suspect either that the issues raised at the time are being picked up again, and that some kind of intellectual renaissance is presently occurring in Italy. What has been resurfacing recently in the United States with Empire isn't just another American cultural fad ("Empire" replacing "Globalization") but a bold and controversial social laboratory for the present. Virno's A Grammar of the Multitude is another sign of this return.
In "The Strategy of Refusal," published in 1965, Mario Tronti warned against focusing too much on the power of capital, or assume that it curbs labor power to its own ends. Workers are a class for themselves before being a class against capital. Actually, it is always capital that "seeks to use the worker's antagonistic will-to-struggle as a motor for its own development."5 Empire develops the same argument: capitalism can only be reactive since it is the proletariat that "actually invents the social and productive forms that capital will be forced to adopt in the future."6 It was the Italian workers' stubborn resistance to the Fordist rationalization of work, and not mere technological innovation, that forced capital to make a leap into the post-Fordist era of immaterial work.
Hardt and Negri strongly oppose any
"hybrid thesis" that simultaneously emphasizes the creativity of
capital and of the working class. In this respect they differ
significantly from Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of capital, whose
theory of flows they adopted (Empire clearly echoes A Thousand
Plateaus). Deleuze and Guattari saw capital as fluid, inventive and
adaptive, using every
This is the conclusion Virno arrived at as well in A Grammar of the Multitude. Revisiting the tumultuous years of Autonomia, Virno realized that their struggle hadn't achieved their goals. The political confrontation only had a "semblance" of radical conflict, he says, because what autonomists were claiming wasn't really subversive in itself, just an anticipation of the post-Fordist mutation. Autonomists simply "had the misfortune of being treated [by those who still identified with the declining Fordist paradigm] as if it were a movement of marginal people and parasites," which it was not. And yet, Virno now estimates that it was just an "angry and coarse" version of the post-Fordist multitude because it often confused non-socialist demands (refusal of work, abolition of the state) with a proletarian revolution. ("A lot of people," he wryly notes, "were blathering on about revolution.") Autonomia was a defeated revolution, to which the post-Fordist paradigm was the answer.
But what kind of an "answer" is it? And in what way does the post-Ford era achieve what Autonomia failed to do by more direct means? The new proletariat didn't replace the working class, but extended it to all those
whose
labor is
being exploited by capital. In the post-Fordist economy, surplus value
is no longer extracted from labor materialized in a product, it
resides in the discrepancy between paid and unpaid work-the idle time
of the mind that keeps enriching, unacknowledged, the fruits of
immaterial labor. As Marx wrote in Grundrisse, labor activity moves
"to the side of the production instead of being its chief
actor." The multitude is a force defined less by what it actually
produces than by its virtuosity, its potential to produce and produce
itself. So is it really a gain over what existed before? Workers used
to work in servile conditions, leaving them just enough tune to
replenish. Now their entire life is live labor, an invisible and
indivisible commodity. Today all the multitude does is monitor signs
on a screen. But machines are not "dead labor" anymore, they are part
of the workers' "life labor" which now plugs into the "general
intellect" dissiminating knowledge across the entire public
sphere. The more creative and adaptable the
But is it also true in political terms? The multitude is a new category in political thought. But how "political" is it compared to the autonomia movement? It is, Virno suggests, open to plural experiences and searching for non-representative political forms, but "calmly and realistically," not from a marginal position. In a sense the multitude would finally fulfill Autonomids motto — "The margins at the center" — through its active participation in socialized knowledge. Politics itself has changed anyway. Labor, politics and intellect are no longer separate, actually they have become interchangeable, and this is what gives the multitude a semblance of de-politization. Everything has become "performative." Virno brilliantly develops here his major thesis, an analogy between virtuosity (art, work, speech) and politics. They all are political because they all need an audience, a publicly organized space, which Marx calls "social cooperation," and a common language in which to communicate. And they all are a performance because they find in themselves, and not in any end product, their own fulfillment.
Granted, this is not the assault on the Winter Palace, but autonomists never had that kind of performance in mind either. The contemporary multitude not being a class, it can't build a class consciousness of its own, let alone engage capital in a class struggle. And yet its very existence as multitude, distinct from "We, the People" (always predicated on the State) speaks of "the crisis of the form-of-state" itself. A Grammar of the Multitude dwells at length on the changing nature of contemporary forms of life, but it doesn't elaborate further on this crisis of the nation-state, simply attributes it to the "centrifugal character of the multitude." It is at this point that Empire comes in.
Hardt and Negri embrace as
well the notion of a "postmodern" social class, but they try and
offset its increasing political disaffection by drastically changing
its scale and ideological horizon. For them it isn't just the
crisis of the form-of-state that the multitude announces, but of
the very form-of-empire presently being shaped by
globalization. Empire is a powerful political synthesis of the
momentous transformations that are relegating
It is a bold claim that aims to shake Empire at its very foundation. Placing Virno's multitude at the heart of Empire opens up an entirely new political paradigm, while conveniently keeping class struggle as the motor of history. The dwindling of the nation-states, though, could well have weakened the revolutionary movement, and many would argue that it did, but Hardt and Negri are emphatic that the "new social class" was indeed bolstered by the emergence of supranational structures. So they wouldn't oppose globalization, actually welcome Empire as Autonomia praised America. Clearly, they needed an oversize enemy to build up the defeated Italian movement into a global counter power.
The global multitude is hybrid, fluid, mutant, deterritorialized, just like immaterial workers of the postmodern world, and yet, in mysterious ways, it is supposed to encompass the world poor which replaced the working-class at the bottom of the ladder. (Traditionally the workers' movement has been distrustful of the unorganized lumpenproletariat). The poor are not immaterial, they all-too-material themselves in their wretchedness, and Negri often evokes in general terms their kairos of "poverty and love." (The rise of Christianity during the decline of the Roman Empire runs throughout much of Empire as an infectious, but problematic, analogy to revolutionary desire). For Hardt and Negri, the multitude is this new social class that removes itself from nations and parties to meet head on the challenge of Empire. "In its will to be-against and its desire for liberation," the multitude "Must push through Empire to come out the other side."7
The other side, of course, is so much better. Paradise is another example. The problem is that a multitude capable of doing such a feat doesn't exist-or doesn't exist yet. At best, it remains a taunting hypothesis, and a promising field of investigation for whoever wants to follow the lead.8 But the idea that capital could simply be "destroyed" by such an essentialist notion is a bit hard to swallow. Unlike the industrial proletariat, the postmodern multitude doesn't make up "a workers' army," the kind that is readily launched against capital, or against Empire. (The worker's army didn't exactly move against the State during May 1968 in France). The "other side" belongs, poetically, to the panoply of endangered ideologies. That an alternative to the contemporary imperial order is necessary" — the multitude must push through like a battering ram — doesn't make its existence any more tangible. But Hardt and Negri are already busily thinking "how concrete instances of class struggle can actually arise, and moreover form a coherent program of struggle, a constituent power adequate to the destruction of the enemy and the construction of a new society. The question is really how the body of the multitude can configure itself as a telos."9
The telos, in other words, precedes the multitude, and for the most part replaces it. No wonder Empire was so well received in America, and among the people who, incidentally, some twenty-five years ago, looked the other way as the Italian movement was being brutally crushed. (The embattled Italy: Autonomia issue of Semiotext(e), now reissued, was first published in 1980, barely one year after the autonomists' arrests.) Frederic Jameson hailed Empire as "the first great theoretical synthesis of the new millennium" and Etienne Balibar, praising Negri's "hyper-Marxism," acknowledged that it laid the foundations for "a new teleology of class struggles and militancy." As for Slavoj Zizek, his conviction was that "if this book were not written, it would have to be invented." Zizek may even be right there. Didn't Nietzsche say that thinking is always untimely?
What is exciting, actually, in Empire, is the
question it implicitly raises by globalizing the multitude, not the
assumption that it is "the productive force that sustains Empire and
calls for and makes necessary its destruction." This war is
purely mythical, and so is the destruction of capital. That's why
their confrontation quickly takes on an allegorical dimension, a war
between two principles. The multitude being as immaterial as the work
it produces, it is dressed, Hardt and Negri write, "in simplicity, and
also innocence." It is prophetic and productive, an "absolutely positive
force" capable of being changed "into an
absolute democratic power." Even its will to destruction would
eventually become "love and community." Evil Empire, on the other
hand, the con-enemy, is just an "empty shell," a giant
Because History can't wait. There is a question that keeps coming up again and again throughout Negri's writings, and it is the irreducibility of the moment of decision. Although he pays lip service to the tradition of "vitalist materialism" — Nietzsche, Bergson, Deleuze — the "will to power" or the "élan vital" obviously aren't enough for a lusty Leninist. These always run the risk, he writes, of "getting caught in the sophisms of the bad infinite: an infinite that dilutes the intensity of the decision..."11 Without a telos, a big narrative, a decision would mean nothing anyway. Empire involves an original kind of class struggle: a struggle looking for a class. For Virno it would be just the reverse: a class looking for a struggle. But Hardt and Negri already know what kind of class they are looking for. Their real purpose is to jump-start the revolutionary machine. They quote Spinoza: "The prophet produces its own people." They want to produce their own multitude, but they are not exactly sure it will work. They even admit it candidly: "It is not at all clear that this prophetic function can effectively address our political needs and sustain a manifesto of the postmodern revolution against Empire..."12 A postmodern revolution, no less. The class struggle was postmodern too.
Virno doesn't have any telos up his sleeve, no ready-made program for the multitude-certainly not coming out "the other side." It's been tried before, didn't turn out so well. Why should a "postmodern revolution" be any different? Anyone who cares for the multitude should first figure out what it is about and what could be expected from it, not derive its mode of being from some revolutionary essence. The ultimate goal of Virno's inventive inventory is "rescuing political action from its current paralysis." Empire is trying that too, but a straw fight won't do — The Multitude Strikes Back...
Virno may be onto something when he suggests
that Post-Fordism is the communism of capital." It doesn't say that
there is no more fights in sight, that post-Fordism brought us
"communism." Fights should be expected, but not a war that
would allegedly destroy the enemy. A combat rather, meant to
strengthen some forces present in capital, and join them
"The communism of capital": there is as much communism in capital as capital is capable of too: abolition of work, dissolution of the state, etc. But communism in any shape or form would require equality, and this, capital is incapable of providing. Post-Fordism therefore can only satisfy the demands of a virtual communism. A communality of generalized intellect without material equality. How "communistic" can that be? And can this virtual communism be enough to turn subjected "people" into a freer "multitude"? This is what Empire is claiming to achieve, but the multitude isn't exactly thriving beyond the First World, or below. In under-developing countries the new labor class is finding freedom through uprooting and over-exploitation. Inequalities everywhere are growing exponentially, and so is cynicism, not especially of the creative kind.
This is no reason for disenchantment. One of the virtues of Autonomia is that it was never afraid of claiming out loud: "We are the front of luxury." At the time the exploited proletariat was still considered to be the repository of revolutionary wisdom. But only those who are free from slavery can dare imagine what being really free would be. This is what the Italians were trying to experiment with before Autonomia was "defeated," and that's what they are exploring again today through a lively intellectual debate. The idea of a multitude is part of this on-going project. It is a luxury that we should be able to afford: the luxury of imagining a future that would actively bring together everything we are capable of. These virtualities are present within capital in ambivalent and reversible features that are just waiting to be liberated. Immaterial workers are mobile and detached, adaptable, curious, opportunistic and cynical, also toward institutions; they are inventive and share knowledge through communication and language; they are mostly de-politicized, also disobedient. The multitude is an "amphibious" category that can veer toward "opposing developments," or come to nothing, so a combat is constantly raging — not with Empire, within itself. A combat that first "defines the composition of forces in the combatant,"13 not its victory over an exterior enemy.
Capital affords us to project ahead, work it from within,
knowing
all too well that it will be quick to instrumentalize any creative
move, turning it into binary oppositions, however radical thay claim
to be, proven recipes
Capital doesn't have to be "destroyed." It is self-destructive enough, but not the way Hardt and Negri imagined it. Because it never stops provoking resistance to its own rule. "It is doubtful that the joys of capitalism are enough to liberate the people," Deleuze wrote in 1991.14 "Those who keep invoking the bloody failure of socialism don't seem to consider as a failure the present state of the global capitalist market, with the bloody inequalities it involves, the populations pushed off the market, etc. It's been a long time since the American `revolution' has failed, even before the Soviet's did. The situations and revolutionary attempts are generated by capitalism itself and they are not going to disappear." Capitalism itself is revolutionary because it keeps fomenting inequality and provoking unrest. It also keeps providing its own kind of "communism" both as a vaccine, preventing further escalation, and an incentive to go beyond its own limitations. The multitude responds to both and can go either way, absorbing the shocks or multiplying the fractures that will occur in unpredictable ways.
A specter haunts the world and it is the specter of capital...
Notes
1. Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty, Amherst: The University of Massachussets Press, 1958, p. 56
2. In Karl Marx, Capital I, "The modern theory of colonisation."
3. Cf. Sergio Bologna, "The Tribe of Moles," in Italy: Autonomia. Post-Political Politics. New York: Semiotext(e), III, 3, 1980, pp. 36-61. Edited by Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi.
4. Cf. Bifo, "Anatomy of Autonomy", in Italy: Autonomia, op. cit., pp. 148-170.
5. See Mario Tronti, "The Strategy of refusal", in Italy: Autonomia, op. cit., pp. 28-35.
6. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000, p. 268
7. Empire, op. cit., p. 218.
8. See Christian Marazzi, "Denaro e Guerra" [Money and War]. In Andrea Fumagalli, Christian Marazzi & Adelino Zanini, La Moneta nell Impero, Verona: Ombre Corte, 2003. The crash of the new economy signals the resistance of the multitude to the financialization of the general intellect. Also Breit Nelson, "The Market and the Police: Finance Capital in The Permanent Global War." (Unpublished.)
9. Empire, op. cit., pp. 403-4
10. Empire, op. cit., pp. 413, 344, 361, 63, 361.
11. Antonio Negro, Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitude. Paris: Calmann Levy, 2000, p. 194.
12. Empire, op. cit., p. 63
13. On "war" and "combat", see Gilles Deleuze, Critical and Clinical. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 132.
14. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri, "Nous avons inventé la ritournelle" [We have invented the refrain], Le Nouvel Observateur, September 1991. In Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness. New York: Semiotext(e), 1974. (Forthcoming)
I maintain that the concept of "multitude," as opposed to the more familiar concept of "people," is a crucial tool for every careful analysis of the contemporary public sphere. One must keep in mind that the choice between "people" and "multitude" was at the heart of the practical controversies (the establishing of centralized modern States, religious wars, etc.) and of the theoretical-philosophical controversies of the seventeenth century. These two competing concepts, forged in the fires of intense clashes, played a primary role in the definition of the political-social categories of the modern era. It was the notion of "people" which prevailed. "Multitude" is the losing term, the concept which got the worst of it. In describing the forms of associative life and of the public spirit of the newly constituted great States, one no longer spoke of multitude, but of people. But we need to ask whether, today, at the end of a long cycle, the old dispute has not been opened up once again; whether, today, now that the political theory of the modern era is going through a radical crisis, this once defeated notion is not displaying extraordinary vitality, thus taking its dramatic revenge.
The two polarities, people and multitude, have Hobbes and Spinoza as their putative fathers. For Spinoza, the multitudo indicates a plurality which persists as such in the public scene, in collective action, in the handling of communal affairs, without converging into a One, without evaporating within a centripetal form of motion. Multitude is the form of social and political existence for the many, seen as being many: a permanent form, not an episodic or interstitial form. For Spinoza, the multitudo is the architrave of civil liberties (Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus).
Hobbes detests — and I am using here, after due consideration, a passionate, not very scientific word — the multitude; he rages against it. In the social and political existence of the many, seen as being many, in the plurality which does not converge into a synthetic unity, he sees the greatest danger of a "supreme empire"; that is to say, for that monopoly of political decision-making which is the State. The best way to understand the significance of a concept — multitude, in this case — is to examine it with the eyes of one who has fought it tenaciously. The person who grasps all the implications and the nuances of a concept is precisely the one who wishes to expunge it from the theoretical and practical horizon.
Before giving a brief explanation of the way in which Hobbes portrays the detested multitude, it is good to determine exactly the goal being pursued here. I wish to show that the category of the multitude (precisely as it is treated by its sworn enemy, Hobbes) helps to explain a certain number of contemporary social behaviors. After the centuries of the "people" and then those of the State (nation-State, centralized State, etc.), the opposing polarity returns at last to manifest itself, having been annulled at the dawning of the modern era. Multitude seen as the last cry of social, political and philosophical theory? Perhaps. An entire gamut of considerable phenomena-linguistic games, forms of life, ethical inclinations, salient characteristics of production in today's world-will end up to be only slightly, or not at all, comprehensible, unless understood as originating from the mode of being of the many. To investigate this mode of being, one must have recourse to a rather varied kind of conceptual orchestration: anthropology, philosophy of language, criticism of political economics, ethics. One must circumnavigate the multitude-continent, changing frequently the angle of perspective.
This having been said, let us look briefly at the way in which Hobbes delineates, in his role as perspicacious adversary, the mode of being of the "many." For Hobbes, the decisive political clash is the one which takes place between multitude and people. The modern public sphere can have as its barycenter either one or the other. Civil war, always threatening, has its logical form in this alternative. The concept of people, according to Hobbes, is strictly correlated to the existence of the State; furthermore, it is a reverberation, a reflection of the State: if there is a State, then there are people. In the absence of the State, there are no people. In the De Cive, in which the horror of the multitude is exposed far and wide, we read: "The People is somewhat that is one, having one will, and to whom one action may be attributed" (Hobbes, De Cive, Chap. XII, section VIII).
The
multitude, for Hobbes, is inherent in the "state of nature;"
therefore, it is inherent in that which precedes the "body politic."
But remote
How has the multitude survived the creation of the centralized States? Through what concealed and feeble forms has it made itself known after the full affirmation of the modern concept of sovereignty? Where is its echo heard? Stylizing the question to the extreme, let us try to identify the ways in which the many, seen as being many, have been understood in liberal thought and in democratic-socialist thought (thus, in political traditions which have had their indisputable point of reference in the unity of the people).
In liberal thought,
the uneasiness provoked by the "many" is toned down by means of having
recourse to the pairing of the terms public-private. The multitude,
which is the polar opposite of the people, takes on the slightly
ghostly and mortifying features of the so-called
private. Incidentally, even the public-private dyad itself, before
becoming something indisputable, had been forged through tears and
blood during a thousand theoretical and practical disputes; it is
maintained, therefore, by a complex set of consequences. What could be
more normal for us than to speak of
In democratic-socialist thought, where is it that we find an echo of the archaic multitude? Perhaps in the pairing of the terms collective-individual. Or, better yet, in the second of these terms, in the individual dimension. The people are the collective; the multitude is concealed by the presumed impotence, as well as by the immoderate uneasiness, of single individuals. The individual is the irrelevant remainder of divisions and multiplications which are carried out somewhere far from the individual. In terms of what can be called individual in the strictest sense, the individual seems indescribable. just as the multitude is indescribable within the democratic-socialist tradition.
At this point I should speak in advance of an opinion which will appear on several occasions in what I will have to say later. I believe that in today's forms of life one has a direct perception of the fact that the cou pling of the terms public-private, as well as the coupling of the terms collective-individual, can no longer stand up on their own, that they are gasping for air, burning themselves out. This is just like what is happening in the world of contemporary production, provided that production — loaded as it is with ethos, culture, linguistic interaction — not give itself over to econometric analysis, but rather be understood as a broad-based experience of the world. That which was rigidly subdivided now blends together and is superimposed upon itself. It is difficult to say where collective experience ends and individual experience begins. It is difficult to separate public experience from so-called private experience. In this blurring of borders, even the two categories of citizen and of producer fail us; or they become only slightly dependable as categories, even though they were so important in Rousseau, Smith, Hegel, and even in Marx himself (though being nothing more than a polemical butt).
The contemporary multitude is composed neither of "citizens" nor of "producers;" it occupies a middle region between "individual and collective;" for the multitude, then, the distinction between "public" and "private" is in no way validated. And it is precisely because of the dissolution of the coupling of these terms, for so long held to be obvious, that one can no longer speak of a people converging into the unity of the state. While one does not wish to sing out-of-tune melodies in the post-modern style ("multiplicity is good, unity is the disaster to beware of"), it is necessary, however, to recognize that the multitude does not clash with the One; rather, it redefines it. Even the many need a form of unity, of being a One. But here is the point: this unity is no longer the State; rather, it is language, intellect, the communal faculties of the human race. The One is no longer a promise, it is a premise. Unity is no longer something (the State, the sovereign) towards which things converge, as in the case of the people; rather, it is taken for granted, as a background or a necessary precondition. The many must be thought of as the individualization of the universal, of the generic, of the shared experience. Thus, in a symmetric manner, we must conceive of a One which, far from being something conclusive, might be thought of as the base which authorizes differentiation or which allows for the political-social existence of the many seen as being many. I say this only in order to emphasize that present-day reflection on the category of multitude does not allow for rapturous simplifications or superficial abbreviations; instead, such reflection must confront some harsh problems: above all the logical problem (which needs to be reformulated, not removed) of the relationship of One/Many.
The concrete definitions of the
contemporary multitude can be placed in focus through the development
of three thematic units. The first of these is very Hobbesian: the
dialectic between fear and the search for security. It is clear that
even the concept of "people" (in its seventeenth century
articulations, either liberal or democratic-socialist) is centered
around certain strategies developed to foil danger and to obtain
protection. I will maintain (in today's presentation) that on the
empirical and conceptual levels, the forms of fear have failed,
together with the corresponding types of refuge to which the notion of
"people" has been connected. What prevails instead is a dialectic of
dread-refuge which is quite different: one which defines several
characteristic traits of today's multitude. Fear-security: this is the
grid or litmus paper which is philosophically and sociologically
relevant
The second theme, which I will deal with in the next seminar, is the relation between the concept of multitude and the crisis of the ancient tripartitioning of human experience into Labor, Politics, Thought. This has to do with a subdivision proposed by Aristotle, then taken up again in the twentieth century, above all by Hannah Arendt, and encysted until very recently within our notion of common sense. This is a subdivision which now, however, has fallen apart.
The third thematic unit consists of sifting through several categories in order to be able to say something about the subjectivity of the multitude. Above all, I will examine three of these categories: the principle of indi viduation, and the categories of idle talk and curiosity. The first of these categories is an austere and wrongly neglected metaphysical question: what is it that renders an individual identity individual? The other two categories, instead, have to do with daily life. It was Heidegger who conferred the dignity of philosophical concepts upon the categories of idle talk and curiosity. Even though my argument will avail itself of certain pages of Being and Time, the manner in which I will speak of these categories is substantially non-Heideggerian, or actually anti- Heideggerian.
The dialectic of dread and refuge lies at the center of the "Analytic of the Sublime," a section of the Critique of judgment (Kant, Book II, Part I). According to Kant, when I observe a terrifying snowslide while I myself am in safety, I am filled with a pleasing sense of security mixed together, however, with the heightened perception of my own helplessness. Sublime is precisely the word for this twofold feeling which is partially contradictory. With my starting point being the empirical protection which I have benefited from by chance, I am made to ask myself what it is that could guarantee an absolute and systematic protection for my existence. That is to say, I ask myself what it is that might keep me safe, not from one given danger or another, but from the risk inherent in my very being in this world. Where is it that one can find unconditional refuge? Kant answers: in the moral "I", since it is precisely there that one finds something of the non-contingent, or of the realm above the mundane. The transcendent moral law protects my person in an absolute way, since it places the value which is due to it above finite existence and its numerous dangers. The feeling of the sublime (or at least one of its incarnations) consists of taking the relief I feel for having enjoyed a fortuitous place of refuge and transforming it into a search for the unconditional security which only the moral "I" can guarantee.
I have mentioned Kant for one
specific reason: because he offers a very clear model of the world in
which the dialectic of dread/refuge has been conceived in the last two
centuries. There is a sharp bifurcation here: on one hand a particular
danger (the snowslide, the malevolent attentions of the Department of
the Interior, the loss of one's job, etc.); on the other
The Kantian distinction between the two types of risk and security is drawn out in the distinction, traced by Heidegger, between fear and anguish. Fear refers to a very specific fact, to the familiar snowslide or to the loss of one's job; anguish, instead, has no clear cause which sparks it off. In the pages of Heidegger's Being and Time (Heidegger, S 40) anguish is provoked purely and simply by our being exposed to the world, by the uncertainty and indecision with which our relation to this world manifests itself. Fear is always circumscribed and nameable; anguish is ubiquitous, not connected to distinctive causes; it can survive in any given moment or situation. These two forms of dread (fear and anguish), and their corresponding antidotes, lend themselves to a historical-social analysis.
The distinction between circumscribed fear and unspecified fear is operative where there are substantial communities constituting a channel which is capable of directing our praxis and collective experience. It is a channel made of repetitive, and therefore comfortable, usages and customs, made of a consolidated ethos. Fear situates itself inside the community, inside its forms of life and communication. Anguish, on the other hand, makes its appearance when it distances itself from the community to which it belongs, from its shared habits, from its well-known "linguistic games," and then penetrates into the vast world. Outside of the community, fear is ubiquitous, unforeseeable, constant; in short, anguish-ridden. The counterpart of fear is that security which the community can, in principle, guarantee; the counterpart of anguish (or of its showing itself to the world as such) is the shelter procured from religious experience.
So, the
dividing line between fear and anguish, between relative dread and
absolute dread, is precisely what has failed. The concept of "people,"
even
The first of these reasons is that one can not speak reasonably of substantial communities. In today's world, impulsive changes do not overturn traditional and repetitive forms of life; what they do is to come between individuals who by now have gotten used to no longer having fixed customs, who have gotten used to sudden change, who have been exposed to the unusual and to the unexpected. What we have, then, at every moment and no matter what, is a reality which is repeatedly innovated. It is therefore not possible to establish an actual distinction between a stable "inside" and an uncertain and telluric "outside." The permanent mutability of the forms of life, and the training needed for confronting the unchecked uncertainty of life, lead us to a direct and continuous relation with the world as such, with the imprecise context of our existence.
What we have, then, is a complete overlapping of fear and anguish. If I lose my job, of course I am forced to confront a well defined danger, one which gives rise to a specific kind of dread; but this real danger is immediately colored by an unidentifiable anguish. It is fused together with a more general disorientation in the presence of the world in which we live; it is identified with the absolute insecurity which lives in the human animal, in as much as the human animal is lacking in specialized instincts. One might say: fear is always anguish-ridden; circumscribed danger always makes us face the general risk of being in this world. If the substantial communities once hid or muffled our relationship with the world, then their dissolution now clarifies this relationship for us: the loss of one's job, or the change which alters the features of the functions of labor, or the loneliness of metropolitan life-all these aspects of our relationship with the world assume many of the traits which formerly belonged to the kind of terror one feels outside the walls of the community. We would need to find a new term here, different from "fear" or "anguish," a term which would take the fusion of these two terms into account. What comes to mind for me is the term uncanny. But it would take too much time here to justify the use of this term (Virno, Mondanita: 65-7).
Let us move on to the second critical
approach. According to traditional explanations, fear is a public
feeling, while anguish pertains to the individual who has been
isolated by a fellow human being. In contrast to fear (which is
provoked by a danger pertaining virtually to many members
Now let us consider the third and last critical observation, perhaps the most radical. It concerns the same dread/refuge coupling. What is mistaken in this coupling is the idea that we first experience a sense of dread and, only then, we set ourselves the task of procuring a source of refuge. These stimulus-response or cause-effect models are completely out of place. Rather, one should believe that the original experience would be that of procuring some means of refuge. Above all, we protect ourselves; then, when we are intent on protecting ourselves, we focus on identifying the dangers with which we may have to concern ourselves. Arnold Gehlen used to say that survival, for the human animal, was an oppressive task, and that in order to confront this task we need, above all, to mitigate the disorientation which results from the fact that we are not in possession of a fixed "environment" (Gehlen, Man: His Nature). Within one's living context, this groping attempt to cope with life is basic. Even as we seek to have a sense of orientation which will allow us to protect ourselves, we also perceive, often in retrospect, various forms of danger.
There
is more to the story. Not only does danger define itself starting with
the original search for refuge, but, and this is the truly crucial
point, danger manifests itself for the most part as a specific form of
refuge. If we look carefully, we see that danger consists of a
horrifying strategy of salvation (one need only think of the cult of
some ethnic "enclave"). "The dialectic between danger and refuge is
resolved, in the end, in the dialectic
The experience of the contemporary (or, if your prefer, of the postFordist) multitude is primarily rooted in this modification of the dialectic of dread-refuge. The many, in as much as they are many, are those who share the feeling of "not feeling at home" and who, in fact, place this experience at the center of their own social and political praxis. Furthermore, in the multitude's mode of being, one can observe with the naked eye a continuous oscillation between different, sometimes diametrically opposed, strategies of reassurance (an oscillation which the people, however, do not understand, since they are an integral part of the sovereign States).
In order to have a better understanding of the contemporary notion of multitude, it will be useful to reflect more profoundly upon which essential resources might be the ones we can count on for protection from the dangerousness of the world. I propose to identify these resources by means of an Aristotelian concept, a linguistic concept (or, better yet, one pertaining to the art of rhetoric): the "common places," the topoi koinoi.
When we speak today of "common places," we mean, for
the most part, stereotypical expressions, by now devoid of any
meaning, banalities, lifeless metaphors ("morning is golden-mouthed"),
trite linguistic conventions. Certainly this was not the
original meaning of the expression "common places." For Aristotle
(Rhetoric, I, 2, 1358a) the
topoi koinoi are the most generally valid
logical and linguistic forms Of all of our discourse
These categories, like every true skeletal structure, never appear as such. They are the woof of the "life of the mind," but they are an inconspicuous woof. What is it, then, that can actually be seen in the forms of our dis course? The "special places," as Aristotle calls them (topoi idioi). These are ways of saying something — metaphors, witticisms, allocutions, etc. — which are appropriate in one or another sphere of associative life. "Special places" are ways of saying/thinking something which end up being appropriate at a local political party headquarters, or in church, or in a university classroom, or among sports fans of a certain team. And so on. Whether it be the life of the city or its ethos (shared customs), these are articulated by means of "special places" which are different from one another and often incompatible. A certain expression might function in one situation and not in another; a certain type of argumentation might succeed in convincing one audience, but not another, etc.
The transformation with which we must come to terms can be
summarized in this way: in today's world, the "special places" of
discourse and of argumentation are perishing and dissolving, while
immediate visibility is being gained by the "common places," or
by generic logical-linguistic forms which establish the pattern for
all forms of discourse. This means that in order to get a sense of
orientation in the world and to protect ourselves from its dangers, we
can not rely on those forms of thought, of reasoning, or of discourse
which have their niche in one particular context or another. The clan
of sports fans, the religious community, the branch of a political
party, the workplace: all of these "places" obviously continue to
exist, but none of them is sufficiently characterized or
characterizing as to be able to offer us a wind rose, or a standard of
orientation, a trustworthy compass, a unity of specific customs, of
specific ways of saying/ thinking things. Everywhere, and in every
situation, we speak/ think in the same way, on the basis of
logical-linguistic constructs which are as fundamental as they are
broadly general. An ethical-rhetorical topography is disappearing. The
"common places" (these inadequate principles of the "life of the
mind") arc moving to the forefront: the connection between more and
less,
Being no longer inconspicuous, but rather having been flung into the forefront, the "common places" are the apotropaic resource of the contemporary multitude. They appear on the surface, like a toolbox containing things which are immediately useful. What else are they, these "common places," if not the fundamental core of the "life of the mind," the epicenter of that linguistic (in the strictest sense of the word) animal which is the human animal?
Thus, we could say that the "life of the mind" becomes, in itself, public. We turn to the most general categories in order to equip ourselves for the most varied specific situations, no longer having at our disposal any "special" or sectorial ethical-communicative codes. The feeling of not-feeling-at-home and the preeminence of the "common places" go hand in hand. The intellect as such, the pure intellect, becomes the concrete compass wherever the substantial communities fail, and we are always exposed to the world in its totality. The intellect, even in its most rarefied functions, is presented as something common and conspicuous. The "common places" are no longer an unnoticed background, they are no longer concealed by the springing forth of "special places." The "life of the mind" is the One which lies beneath the mode of being of the multitude. Let me repeat, and I must insist upon this: the movement to the forefront on the part of the intellect as such, the fact that the most general and abstract linguistic structures are becoming instruments for orienting one's own conduct-this situation, in my opinion, is one of the conditions which define the contemporary multitude.
A short
while ago I spoke of the "public intellect." But the expression
"public intellect" contradicts a long tradition according to which
thought would be understood as a secluded and solitary activity, one
which separates us from our peers, an interior action, devoid of
visual manifestations, outside of the handling of human affairs. It
seems that only one thinker takes exception to this long tradition
according to which the "life of the mind" is resistant to publicness;
in several pages of Marx we see the intellect being presented as
something exterior and collective, as a public good. In the "Fragment
on Machines" of the Grundrisse,
(Notebook VII)
Marx speaks of a
general intellect: he uses these words in English to give emphasis to
the expression, as though he wanted to place them in italics. The
notion of "general intellect" can derive from several sources: perhaps
it is a polemical
With the exception of these pages in Marx, I repeat, tradition has attributed to the intellect those characteristics which illustrate its insensitivity to, and estrangement from, the public sphere. In one of the youthful writings of Aristotle, the Protrepticus, the life of the thinker is compared to the life of the stranger. Thinkers must live estranged from their community, must distance themselves from the buzzing activity of the multitude, must mute the sounds of the agora. With respect to public life, to the political-social community, thinkers and strangers alike do not feel themselves, in the strict sense of the expression, to be at home. This is a good point of departure for focusing on the condition of the contemporary multitude. But it is a good point of departure only if we agree to draw some other conclusions from the analogy between the stranger and the thinker.
Being a stranger, that is to say "not-feeling-at-home," is today a condition common to many, an inescapable and shared condition. So then, those who do not feel at home, in order to get a sense of orientation and to protect themselves, must turn to the "common places," or to the most general categories of the linguistic intellect; in this sense, strangers are always thinkers. As you see, I am inverting the direction of the analogy: it is not the thinkers who become strangers in the eyes of the community to which the thinkers belong, but the strangers, the multitude of those "with no home," who are absolutely obliged to attain the status of thinkers. Those "without a home" have no choice but to behave like thinkers: not in order for them to learn something about biology or advanced mathematics, but because they turn to the most essential categories of the abstract intellect in order to protect themselves from the blows of random chance, in order to take refuge from contingency and from the unforeseen.
In Aristotle,
the thinker is the stranger, yes, but only provisionally: once he has
finished writing the Metaphysics, he can return to the task of
dealingwith common affairs. In the same way, even the strangers in the
strict sense of the word, the Spartans who have come to Athens,
are strangers for a specific amount of time: sooner or later, they
will be able to return to their country. For the contemporary
multitude, instead, the condition of "not
And now a secondary observation. Sometimes we
speak about the childishness of contemporary metropolitan forms of
behavior. We speak about it in a deprecatory tone. Once we have agreed
that such deprecation is foolish, it would be worth it to ask
ourselves if there is something of consistency (in short, a kernel of
truth) in the connection between metropolitan life and
childhood. Perhaps childhood is the ontogenetic matrix of every
subsequent search for protection from the blows of the surrounding
world; it exemplifies the necessity of conquering a constituent sense
of indecision, an original uncertainty (indecision and uncertainty
which at times give way to shame, a feeling unknown to the non-human
"baby" which knows from the beginning how to behave). The human baby
protects itself by means of repetition (the same fairy tale, one more
time, or the same game, or the same gesture). Repetition is understood
as a protective strategy in the face of the shock caused by new and
unexpected experiences. So, the problem looks like this: is it not
true that the experience of the baby is transferred into adult
experience, into the prevalent forms of behavior at the center of the
great urban aggregates (described by Simmel, Benjamin, and so many
others)? The childhood experience of repetition is prolonged even into
adulthood, since it constitutes the principal form of safe haven in
the absence of solidly established customs, of substantial
communities, of a developed and complete ethos. In traditional
societies (or, if you like, in the experience of the "people"), the
repetition which is so dear to babies gave way to more complex and
articulated forms of protection: to ethos; that is to say, to the
usages and customs, to the habits which constitute the base of the
substantial communities. Now, in the age of the multitude, this
substitution no longer occurs. Repetition, far from being replaced,
persists. It was Walter Benjamin who got the point. He dedicated a
great deal of attention to childhood, to childish games, to the love
which a baby has for repetition; and together with this, he identified
the sphere in which new forms of perception are created with the
technical reproducibility of a work of art (Benjamin,
Illuminations). So then, there is some thing to believe in the idea
that there is a connection between these two facets of thought. Within
the possibility of technical
We have said that the multitude is defined by the feeling of not-feeling-athome, just as it was defined by the consequent familiarity with "common places," with the abstract intellect. We need to add, now, that the dialectic dread-safe haven is rooted precisely in this familiarity with the abstract intellect. The public and shared character of the "life of the mind" is colored with ambivalence: it is also, in and of itself, the host to negative possibilities, to formidable figures. The public intellect is the unifying base from which there can spring forth either forms of ghastly protection or forms of protection capable of achieving a real sense of comfort (according to the degree in which, as we have said, they safeguard us from the former forms of protection). The public intellect which the multitude draws upon is the point of departure for opposing developments. When the fundamental abilities of the human being (thought, language, self-reflection, the capacity for learning) come to the forefront, the situation can take on a disquieting and oppressive appearance; or it can even give way to a non-public public sphere, to a non-governmental public sphere, far from the myths and rituals of sovereignty.
My thesis, in
extremely concise form, is this: if the publicness of the intellect
does not yield to the realm of a public sphere, of a political space
in which the many can tend to common affairs, then it produces
terrifying effects. A publicness without a public sphere: here
is the negative side — the evil, if you wish — of the experience of the
multitude. Freud in the essay "The
Uncanny"
(Freud, Collected Papers)
shows how the extrinsic power of thought can take on anguishing
features. He says that people who are ill, for whom thoughts have an
exterior, practical and immediately operative power, fear becoming
conditioned and overwhelmed by others. It is the same situation,
moreover, which is brought about in a spiritualist seance in which the
participants are bound together in a fused relationship which seems to
nullify every trace of individual identity. So then, the belief in the
"omnipotence of thought," studied by Freud, and the extreme situation
of the spiritualist seance exemplify clearly what publicness without a
public
sphere can become; what general intellect can become
when it is not articulated within a political space.
The general intellect, or public intellect, if it does not become a republic, a public sphere, a political community, drastically increases forms of submission. To make the point clear, let us think about contemporary production. The sharing of linguistic and cognitive habits is the constituent element of the post-Fordist process of labor. All the workers enter into production in as much as they are speaking-thinking. This has nothing to do, mind you, with "professionality" or with the ancient concept of "skill" or "craftsmanship": to speak/to think are generic habits of the human animal, the opposite of any sort of specialization. This preliminary sharing in one way characterizes the "many," seen as being "many," the multitude; in another way, it is itself the base of today's production. Sharing, in so far as it is a technical requirement, is opposed to the division of labor — it contradicts that division and causes it to crumble. Of course this does not mean that work loads are no longer subdivided, parceled out, etc.; rather, it means that the segmentation of duties no longer answers to objective "technical" criteria, but is, instead, explicitly arbitrary, reversible, changeable. As far as capital is concerned, what really counts is the original sharing of linguistic-cognitive talents, since it is this sharing which guarantees readiness, adaptability, etc., in reacting to innovation. So, it is evident that this sharing of generic cognitive and linguistic talents within the process of real production does not become a public sphere, does not become a political community or a constitutional principle. So then, what happens?
The publicness of the intellect, that is to say the sharing of the intellect, in one sense causes every rigid division of labor to fall flat on its back; in another sense, however, it fosters personal dependence. General intellect, the end of the division of labor, personal dependency: the three facets are interrelated. The publicness of the intellect, when it does not take place in a public sphere, translates into an unchecked proliferation of hierarchies as groundless as they are thriving. The dependency is personal in two senses of the word: in the world of labor one depends on this person or on that person, not on rules endowed with anonymous coercive power; moreover, it is the whole person who is subdued, the person's basic communicative and cognitive habits.
The point of departure
for our analysis was the opposition between the terms "people" and
"multitude." From what we have discussed up to this
The people are the result of a centripetal movement: from atomized individuals, to the unity of the "body politic," to sovereignty. The extreme outcome of this centripetal movement is the One. The multitude, on the other hand, is the outcome of a centrifugal movement: from the One to the Many. But which One is it that serves as the starting point from which the many differentiate themselves and remain so? Certainly it can not be the State; it must have to do with some completely different form of unity/universality. We can now consider once again a point to which we referred at the beginning of our analysis.
The unity which the multitude has behind itself is constituted by the "common places" of the mind, by the linguistic-cognitive faculties common to the species, by the general intellect. It has to do with a unity/universality which is visibly unlike that of the state. Let us be clear: the cognitive-linguistic habits of the species do not come to the forefront because someone decides to make them come to the forefront; they do so out of necessity, or because they constitute a form of protection in a society devoid of substantial communities (or of "special places").
The One of the multitude, then, is not the One of the people. The multitude does not converge into a volonté générale for one simple reason: because it already has access to a general intellect. The public intellect, however, which appears in the post-Ford world as a mere resource of production, can constitute a different "constitutional principle"; it can overshadow a non-state public sphere. The many, in as much as they are many, use the publicness of the intellect as their base or pedestal: for better or for worse.
Certainly there is a substantial difference
between the contemporary multitude and the multitude which was studied
by seventeenth century philosophers of political thought. At the
dawning of the modern era, the many" coincided with the citizens of
the communal republics prior to the birth of the great national
States. Those "many" made use of the "right of resistance," of the
jus
resistentiae. That right, nonsensically, does not mean legitimate
defense: it is something more subtle and complicated. The "right of
resistance" consists of validating the prerogatives of an individual
or of a local community, or of a corporation, in contrast to the
central power structure, thus safeguarding forms of life which have
already been affirmed as free-standing forms, thus protecting
practices already rooted in society. It
We must hold at bay the demon of the analogy, the short circuiting between the ancient and the very modern; we need to delineate in high relief the original historical traits of the contemporary multitude, while avoiding to define this multitude as simply a remake of something which once was. Let me give an example. It is typical of the post-Ford multitude to foment the collapse of political representation: not as an anarchic gesture, but as a means of calmly and realistically searching for new political forms. Of course Hobbes was already putting us on alert with reference to the tendency of the multitude to take on the forms of irregular political organisms: "in their nature but leagues, or sometimes mere concourse of people, without union to any particular design, not by obligation of one to another" (Hobbes, Leviathan: 154). But it is obvious that non-representative democracy based upon the general intellect has an entirely different significance: it is in no way interstitial, marginal or residual; rather, it is the concrete appropriation and re-articulation of the knowledge/power unity which has congealed within the administrative modern machine of the States.
When we speak of "multitude," we run up against a
complex problem: we must confront a concept without a history, without
a lexicon, whereas the concept of "people" is a completely codified
concept for which we have appropriate words and nuances of
every sort. This is obviously the way it is. I have already said that
the "people" prevailed against the "multitude" in the
political-philosophical thought of the seventeenth century: thus, the
"people" have enjoyed the privilege of a suitable lexicon. With regard
to the
It is quite clear that "people" and "multitude" are two categories which are more in line with political thought than with sociology; in fact, they signbetween themselves, alternate forms of political existence. But it is my opinion that the notion of the multitude is extraordinarily rich in terms of allowing us to understand, to assess the modes of being of post-Ford subordinate labor, to understand some of the forms of behavior of that labor which at first sight seemed so enigmatic. As I will try to explain more completely in the second day of our symposium, this is precisely a category of political thought which, having been defeated in the theoretical debate of its time, now presents itself again as a most valuable instrument for the analysis of living labor in the post-Ford era. Let us say that the multitude is an amphibian category: on one hand it speaks to us of social production based on knowledge and language; on the other hand, it speaks of the crisis of the form-of-State. And perhaps there is a strong connection between these two things. Carl Schmitt is someone who has grasped the essential nature of the State and who is the major theoretician of the politics of the past century; in the Sixties, when he was already an old man, he wrote a very bitter (for him) statement, the sense of which is that as the multitude reappears, the people fade away: "The era of stateness [Staatlichkeit] is nearing its end [...]. The State as the model of political unity, the State as the holder of the most extraordinary of all monopolies, that is to say, of the monopoly of political decision-making [...] is being dethroned" (Schmitt. Der Begriff 10 [note: English translation from the German, by the translators]). One important addition, however, must be made: this monopoly of decision making can be truly taken away from the State only when it ceases for once and for all to be a monopoly, only when the multitude asserts its centrifugal character.
I would like
to conclude this first day of our seminar by dispelling, as much as I
can, a misunderstanding into which it is easy to fall. It might seem
as though the multitude would mark the end of the labor class. In
the universe of the "many," there is no longer room for the
blue collar workers, all of them equal, who make up a unified body
among them, a body which is not very sensitive to the kaleidoscope of
the "difference" among them.
On the other hand, there are passages even in Marx in which the labor class loses the appearance of the "people" and acquires the features of the "multitude." Just one example: let us think about the pages of the last chapter of the first book of the Capital, where Marx analyzes the condition of the labor class in the United States (Volume 1, Chap. 33, "The modern theory of colonization"). There is, in that chapter, some great writing on the subject of the American West, on the exodus from the East, on the individual initiative of the "many." The European laborers, driven away from their own countries by epidemics, famines and economic crises, go off to work on the East Coast of the United States. But let us note: they remain there for a few years, only for a few years. Then they desert the factory, moving West, towards free lands. Wage labor is seen as a transitory phase, rather than as a life sentence. Even if only for a twenty-year period, the wage laborers had the possibility of planting the seeds of disorder into the ironclad laws of the labor market: by renouncing their own initial condition, they brought about a relative shortage of manpower and thus a raise in salaries. Marx, in describing this situation, offers us a very vivid portrait of a labor class which is also a multitude.
In our previous seminar I tried to illustrate the mode of being of the multitude, beginning with the dialectic dread-safe haven. Today, I would like to discuss the classical division of human experience into three fundamental spheres: Labor (or poiesis), political Action (or praxis) and Intellect (or life of the mind). The goal here is still the same: to articulate and to investigate in depth the notion of multitude.
As you will recall, "multitude" is a central category of political thought: it is called into question here in order to explain some of the salient features of the post-Ford mode of production. We do so on the condition that we understand "mode of production" to mean not only one particular economic configuration, but also a composite unity of forms of life, a social, anthropological and ethical cluster: "ethical," let us note, and not "moral"; in question here are common practices, usages and customs, not the dimension of the must-be. So then, I would like to maintain that the contemporary multitude has as its background the crisis of the subdivision of human experience into Labor, (political) Action and Intellect. The multitude affirms itself, in high relief, as a mode of being in which there is a juxtaposition, or at least a hybridization, between spheres which, until very recently, even during the Ford era, seemed clearly distinct and separated.
Labor, Action,
Intellect: in the style of a tradition which goes back to Aristotle
and which has been revisited with particular efficacy and passion by
Hannah Arendt (Arendt, The Human
Condition),
this tripartitioning has seemed clear, realistic, nearly unquestionable. It has put
down
solid roots in the realm of common sense: it is not a question, then,
of an undertaking which is only philosophical, but of a widely shared
pattern of
Labor is the organic exchange with nature, the production of new objects, a repetitive and foreseeable process. The pure intellect has a solitary and inconspicuous character: the meditation of the thinker escapes the notice of others; theoretical reflection mutes the world of appearances. Differently from Labor, political Action comes between social relations, not between natural materials; it has to do with the possible and the unforeseen; it does not obstruct, with ulterior motives, the context in which it operates; rather, it modifies this very context. Differently from the Intellect, political Action is public, consigned to exteriority, to contingency, to the buzzing of the "many;" it involves, to use the words of Hannah, "the presence of others" (Human Condition, Chap. V, "Action"). The concept of political Action can be deduced by opposition with respect to the other two spheres.
So then, this ancient tripartitioning, which was still encysted into the realm of common sense of the generation which made its appearance in the public scene in the Sixties, is exactly what has failed today. That is to say, the boundaries between pure intellectual activity, political action, and labor have dissolved. I will maintain, in particular, that the world of socalled post-Fordist labor has absorbed into itself many of the typical characteristics of political action; and that this fusion between Politics and Labor constitutes a decisive physiognomic trait of the contemporary multitude.
Contemporary labor has introjected into itself many characteristics which originally marked the experience of politics. Poiesis has taken on numerous aspects of praxis. This is the first aspect of the most general form of hybridization which I would like to address.
But let us note that even Hannah Arendt insisted on denouncing the collapse of the border between labor and politics — whereby politics does not mean life in some local party headquarters, but the generically human experience of beginning something again, an intimate relationship with contingency and the unforeseen, being in the presence of others. Politics, according to Arendt, has taken to imitating labor. The politics of the twentieth century, in her judgment, has become a sort of fabrication of new objects: the State, the political party, history, etc. So then, I maintain that things have gone in the opposite direction from what Arendt seems to believe: it is not that politics has conformed to labor; it is rather that labor has acquired the traditional features of political action. My reasoning is opposite and symmetrical with respect to that of Arendt. I maintain that it is in the world of contemporary labor that we find the "being in the presence of others," the relationship with the presence of others, the beginning of new processes, and the constitutive familiarity with contingency, the unforeseen and the possible. I maintain that post-Fordist labor, the productive labor of surplus, subordinate labor, brings into play the talents and the qualifications which, according to a secular tradition, had more to do with political action.
Incidentally, this explains, in my opinion, the crisis of politics, the sense of scorn surrounding political praxis today, the disrepute into which action has fallen. In fact, political action now seems, in a disastrous way, like some superfluous duplication of the experience of labor, since the latter experience, even if in a deformed and despotic manner, has subsumed into itself certain structural characteristics of political action. The sphere of politics, in the strictest sense of the word, follows closely the procedures and stylistic elements which define the current state of labor; but let us note: it follows them closely while offering a poorer, cruder and more simplistic version of these procedures and stylistic elements. Politics offers a network of communication and a cognitive content of a more wretched variety than what is carried out in the current productive process. While less complex than labor and yet too similar to it, political action seems, all the same, like something not very desirable at all.
The inclusion of certain structural features of political praxis in contemporary production helps us to understand why the post-Ford multitude might be seen, today, as a de-politicized multitude. There is already too much politics in the world of wage labor (in as much as it is wage labor) in order for politics as such to continue to enjoy an autonomous dignity.
The subsumption into the labor process of what formerly guaranteed an indisputable physiognomy for public Action can be clarified by means of an ancient, but by no means ineffective, category: virtuosity.
Accepting, for now, the normal meaning of the word, by "virtuosity" I mean the special capabilities of a performing artist. A virtuoso, for example, is the pianist who offers us a memorable performance of Schubert; or it is a skilled dancer, or a persuasive orator, or a teacher who is never boring, or a priest who delivers a fascinating sermon. Let us consider carefully what defines the activity of virtuosos, of performing artists. First of all, theirs is an activity which finds its own fulfillment (that is, its own purpose) in itself, without objectifying itself into an end product, without settling into a "finished product," or into an object which would survive the performance. Secondly, it is an activity which requires the presence of others, which exists only in the presence of an audience.
An activity without an end product: the performance of a pianist or of a dancer does not leave us with a defined object distinguishable from the performance itself, capable of continuing after the performance has ended. An activity which requires the presence of others: the performance [Author uses the English word here] makes sense only if it is seen or heard. It is obvious that these two characteristics are inter-related: virtuosos need the presence of an audience precisely because they are not producing an end product, an object which will circulate through the world once the activity has ceased. Lacking a specific extrinsic product, the virtuoso has to rely on witnesses.
The category of virtuosity
is discussed in the Nicomachean Ethics; it appears here and there in
modern political thought, even in the twentieth century; it even holds
a small place in Marx's criticism of political economics. In
the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle distinguishes labor (or
poiesis) from
political action (or praxis), utilizing precisely the notion of
virtuosity: we have labor when an object is produced, an opus which
can be separated from action; we have praxis when the purpose of
action is found in action itself. Aristotle writes: "For while making
has an end other than itself, action cannot; for good action
[understood both as ethical conduct and as political action, Virno
adds] itself is its end" (Nicomachean Ethic, VI, 1140
b). Implicitly
resuming Aristotle's idea, Hannah Arendt compares the performing
artists, the virtuosos, to those who are engaged in political
action. She writes: "The performing arts [...] have indeed a strong
affinity with politics. Performing artists-dancers, play-actors,
One could say that every political action is virtuosic. Every political action, in fact, shares with virtuosity a sense of contingency, the absence of a "finished product," the immediate and unavoidable presence of others. On the one hand, all virtuosity is intrinsically political. Think about the case of Glenn Gould (Gould, The Glenn Gould Reader; and Schneider, Glenn Gould). This great pianist paradoxically, hated the distinctive characteristics of his activity as a performing artist; to put it another way, he detested public exhibition. Throughout his life he fought against the "political dimension" intrinsic to his profession. At a certain point Gould declared that he wanted to abandon the "active life," that is, the act of being exposed to the eyes of others (note: "active life" is the traditional name for politics). In order to make his own virtuosity non-political, he sought to bring his activity as a performing artist as close as possible to the idea of labor, in the strictest sense, which leaves behind extrinsic products. This meant closing himself inside a recording studio, passing off the production of records (excellent ones, by the way) as an "end product." In order to avoid the public-political dimension ingrained in virtuosity, he had to pretend that his masterly performances produced a defined object (independent of the performance itself). Where there is an end product, an autonomous product, there is labor, no longer virtuosity, nor, for that reason, politics.
Even Marx speaks of pianists, orators,
dancers, etc. He speaks of them in some of his most important
writings: in his "Results of the Immediate Process of Production," and
then, in almost identical terms, in his Theories of
Surplus-value. Marx analyzes intellectual labor, distinguishing
between its two principal types. On one hand, there is immaterial or
mental activity which "results in commodities which exist separately
from the producer [...] books, paintings and all products of art as
distinct from the artistic achievement of the practicing artist" (in
Appendix to Capital, Vol.
I, "Results of the Immediate Process of
Production": 1048). This is the first type of intellectual labor. On
the other hand, Marx writes, we need to consider all those activities
in which the "product is not separable from the act of producing"
(ibid., 1048) — those activities, that is, which find in themselves
their own fulfillment without being objectivized into an end product
which might surpass them. This is the same distinction which Aristotle
made between material production and political action. The only
So then, if intellectual labor which produces an end product does not pose any special problems, labor without an end product (virtuosic labor) places Marx in an embarrassing situation. The first type of intellectual labor conforms to the definition of "productive labor." But what about the second type? I remember in passing, that for Marx,'productive labor is not subordinate or fatiguing or menial labor, but is precisely and only that kind of labor which produces surplus-value. Of course, even virtuosic performances can, in principle, produce surplus-value: the activity of the dancer, of the pianist, etc., if organized in a capitalistic fashion, can be a source of profit. But Marx is disturbed by the strong resemblance between the activity of the performing artist and the servile duties which, thankless and frustrating as they are, do not produce surplus value, and thus return to the realm of non-productive labor. Servile labor is that labor in which no capital is invested, but a wage is paid (example: the personal services of a butler). According to Marx, even if the "virtuosist" workers represent, on one hand, a not very significant exception to the quantitative point of view, on the other hand, and this is what counts more, they almost always converge into the realm of servile/non-productive labor. Such convergence is sanctioned precisely by the fact that their activity does not give way to an independent end product: where an autonomous finished product is lacking, for the most part one cannot speak of productive (surplus-value) labor. Marx virtually accepts the equation work-without-end-product = personal services. In conclusion, virtuosic labor, for Marx, is a form of wage labor which is not, at the same time, productive labor (Theories of Surplus-value: 410-411).
Let us try to sum things up. Virtuosity is open to two
alternatives: either it conceals the structural characteristics of
political activity (lack of an end product, being exposed to the
presence of others, sense of contin gency, etc.), as Aristotle and
Hannah Arendt suggest; or, as in Marx, is takes on the features of
"wage labor which is not productive labor." This bifurcation decays
and falls to pieces when productive labor, in its
totality. appropriates the special characteristics of the performing
artist. In post-
Do you remember the extremely renowned commentary of Max Weber on politics as profession? (Weber, Politics as a Vocation) Weber elaborates on a series of qualities which define the politician: knowing how to place the health of one's own soul in danger; an equal balance between the ethics of convincing and the ethics of responsibility; dedication to one's goal, etc. We should re-read this text with reference to Toyotaism, to labor based upon language, to the productive mobilization of the cognitive faculties. Weber's wisdom speaks to us of the qualities required today for material production.
Each one of us is, and has always been, a virtuoso, a performing artist, at times mediocre or awkward, but, in any event, a virtuoso. In fact, the fundamental model of virtuosity, the experience which is the base of the concept, is the activity of the speaker. This is not the activity of a knowledgeable and erudite locutor, but of any locutor. Human verbal language, not being a pure tool or a complex of instrumental signals (these are characteristics which are inherent, if anything, in the languages of non-human animals: one need only think of bees and of the signals which they use for coordinating the procurement of food), has its fulfillment in itself and does not produce (at least not as a rule, not necessarily) an "object" independent of the very act of having been uttered.
Language is "without end product." Every
utterance is a virtuosic performance. And this is so, also because,
obviously, utterance is connected (directly or indirectly) to the
presence of others. Language presupposes and, at the same time,
institutes once again the "publicly organized space" which Arendt
speaks about. One would need to reread the passages from the
Nicomachean Ethics on the essential difference between poiesis
(production)
There is more to the story. The speaker alone — unlike the pianist, the dancer or the actor— can do without a script or a score. The speaker's virtuosity is twofold: not only does it not produce an end product which is distinguishable from performance, but it does not even leave behind an end product which could be actualized by means of performance. In fact, the act of parole makes use only of the potentiality of language, or better yet, of the generic faculty of language: not of a pre-established text in detail. The virtuosity of the speaker is the prototype and apex of all other forms of virtuosity, precisely because it includes within itself the potential/act relationship, whereas ordinary or derivative virtuosity, instead, presupposes a determined act (as in Bach's "Goldberg" Variations, let us say), which can be relived over and over again. But I will return to this point later.
It is enough to say, for now, that contemporary production becomes "virtuosic" (and thus political) precisely because it includes within itself linguistic experience as such. If this is so, the matrix of post-Fordism can be found in the industrial sectors in which there is "production of communication by means of communication"; hence, in the culture industry.
Virtuosity becomes labor for the masses with the onset of a culture industry. It is here that the virtuoso begins to punch a time card. Within the sphere of a culture industry, in fact, activity without an end product, that is to say, communicative activity which has itself as an end, is a distinctive central and necessary element. But, exactly for this reason, it is above all within the culture industry that the structure of wage labor h