Chapter 4: The war on totality: subjectivity, total refusal and social composition

May 1968 and the creation of a creation

Much of the literature on ‘Post-modernism’ connects its genesis with the post-war western generation’s experience centred around the events of 1968. However these event are often treated as a purely reactive moments of struggle against the entrenchment of modernism and its hierarchies in western social, political and cultural institutions.[425] Often the association made between post-modernism and this ‘cultural turn’ has been seen to marginalise the political dimensions of the events.

“When the central idea of French May – the union of intellectual contestation and workers’ struggle – is forgotten, what remains is merely the prefiguration of an ‘emancipatory’ counterculture, a metaphysics of desire and liberation.”[426]

Whilst the focus on 1968 as a political event is tremendously important, the trouble with this conception is that it sees desire and liberation as something lying outside of the classical workers struggle. It may be the case that the true power of the events themselves were the result of the intervention of the traditional working class, and this is a useful counter to the notion that they amounted to merely student frivolity or even in the words of Régis Debray “the cradle of a new bourgeois society.” But Ross’s claim fails to acknowledge the new social form of the general revolt of the producer involving the young and marginalised who are part of the reserve army of labour, but did not occupy any privileged position in the labour aristocracy and whose labour was characterised by low pay and insecurity. The rhetoric of the Enragés movement, closely connected to the International Situationists, provided a language whereby those disgruntled and disaffected by the developing consumer culture could find voice. A parallel development that is equally lost by a political view that only looks at the revolt of the traditional working class is that of the reformation of class composition in the face of new forms of non-material production which placed youth and the marginalised in a stronger social position from which to generate political change. [427]

The precariousness of this new working class, many of whom had become students in order to get grants to pursue other aims is an indication of the emergence of the diffuse social labourer so important to the productivist explanation of the post-modern condition that will be seen in Negri’s theory. Suffice to say that what registered the difference of the events of May 1968 was a new form of generalised protest against society which was not reducible to the struggle over the wage, but broadened to a more total struggle over the nature of contemporary social life. This is not to claim that there are no class precedents in the burgeoning workers struggle. In fact as Steve Wright has shown in the case of Italy, there was a strong link between the collaboration of the intellectual, the worker and the student within the factory. As such there was what could be called a new political economy of labour developing, in the work of Quaderni Rossi for instance that represented an attempt at creating a, ‘sociology of labour and industry that [was] not at the service of technological development but rather of workers’ struggle…’[428] This sociological admixture of experience and theory termed ‘inchiesta operaia’, carried out by people like Romano Alquati and Gianfranco Faina, is an important origin of the autonomist tradition and its meeting with aleatory materialism in the work of Negri. It comprised of many different elements, including a renewed focus on the role of women, but also involved a predictive type of social analysis that could estimate when and where the struggles would emerge and what cycle they follow. It was in this meeting of empirical social research and oral history with a renewed interrogation of the Marxist tradition that led to the restatement of the priority of productive power in generating capitalist crisis. In these terms it makes sense to say that,

“The year 1968 also marks a watershed in the history of the international discipline of political sociology: the violent eruption of the new forces did not only challenge the models and the theories of the fifties and the early sixties, but also forced a revaluation of data-gathering techniques and analysis strategies.” [429]

It needs to be added that the enduring effect of 1968 lies in the beginnings of a democratisation of the institutions of knowledge production and the proliferation of different spaces where such knowledge was produced. This is one of the most important practical reasons for breakdown of theoretical systems of totality. Indeed Foucault has claimed that May 1968 represented a revolt against a certain prohibition on learning, such that it was an intellectual revolution too that involved bringing into the university the consideration of everyday life.[430] May 1968 also allowed for, or witnessed, the proliferation of a different rhetoric of emancipation that more directly broke with the labour movement. May ’68 is an ideal rupture, it is a break with the past, but the new is not yet defined. For instance in the case of France there were very few specifically feminist themes in the various protests, although feminists now look back to ’68 as the beginnings of their social movement. Indeed Simone De Beauvoir’s books were unpopular in France; it was only after 1968 when they became popular in America that there was any domestic acceptance.[431] In the intellectual and political break with Marxisms, new articulations of the totality were created that did not take their universalism from class. Feminism represents the most prominent modern to post-modern social movement of separation from this discourse. Although the beginnings of the ‘second wave’ for a while toyed with the possibility of linking in a unitary synthetic struggle with the labour movement it was not to be. Despite this, these cases represent the separation of Marxist discourse from its position within the working class and the proliferation of its appearance in different modes of political critique.

The Situationists are perhaps the most controversial legacy of 1968 and the most consistent protest against the totality of social life and the separations that it creates. Although there was some precedent for the critique of separation in the more conventional Leninist interventions in the events, such as the opposition to the separation of the political from the social in the politics of the French Communist Party as criticised expressly by Andre Glucksman,[432] the Situationists, emboldened by the tradition of total refusal in Dada and Surrealism, produced a more embracing and new critique of the banal spectacularisation of divided modern life. Following a theme of their more moderate cousin, Henri Lefebvre, the SI, so influential over ’68, believed that the authentic revolution denied any possibility of a separated activity, as Vaneigem opined, ‘anything separate from the realisation of everyday life rejoins the spectacle.’[433] In their critique of the totality, the Situationists reinvented the humanist dimensions of Lukácsian Marxism in order to liberate the creative potential of a politics that was about the discovery of authentic life.

The Situationists on totality and separation

One of Debord’s films was called A Critique of Separation in which he claims, “The only adventure, we said, is to contest the totality, whose centre is this way of living, where we can test our strength but never use it.” He then goes on to say that in our failure to dominate our environment collectively, the individual is impossible and further that,

“as long as we are unable to make our own history, to freely create situations, striving toward unity will introduce other separations. The quest for a central activity leads to the formation of new specializations.”

This is a claim for the emancipation of the individual through the collective. What influenced Debord to theorise the critique of separation in The Society of the Spectacle has a definite continuity with earlier Surrealist themes of trying to discover the unity of experience.[434] But this unity of experience is intrinsically connected with a romantic longing for authenticity that is mediated by the totality. This theme continues throughout Surrealist and Situationist critiques of separation and critiques of alienation from other humanist and Hegelian Marxist quarters. There is often a strong underlying normative and highly metaphysical aspiration for the re-unification of being and consciousness at work in them that does not actually account to the 'everyday' except to highlight within it an absence. These ideas of authentic being, human realisation, and the rational follow highly abstract, utopian and subjective norms. This comes from the luxury of total negativity that allows for constant generation of critique but only works by raising the real to the level of the ideal.

Bataille’s linking of moments of excess with an immanent moment of un-knowing in collective inner experience offers a pressing criticism here. Although seemingly orientated to the same horizon, the ceaseless labour of the negative denies the synthetic moment.[435] Whereas for Debord the response to separation remained one of unity and required a centralized political activity, in Bataille it meets with further abandonment, disintegration and loss, where ultimately the discontinuity of life disbands into death. Debord is for all intents and purposes a modernist and earlier in the text he speaks of his epoch as having both a pretension to be being rational and being governed by change. However, in the historical context of post-war economic prosperity, full employment and reconstruction, Debord and Vaneigem shifted the emphasis of the critique of capitalism from the perspective of needs to that of desire, and especially for Vaneigem, pleasure. This shares the normative need for belonging but goes on in the context of the loss of cohesion of the practical political organization around class. By focusing on how capitalism could not realize desires their project became one of critiquing the banality of spectacular separated existence, a critique that had a widespread social impact, perhaps most notably in the form of the pamphlet, the Poverty of Student Life so influential to the ideas expressed in 1968, but also in other popular writings by Vaneigem. Faced with the banality of modern existence, which appeared to form a total domination, the Situationists claimed we were faced with single choice between suicide and revolution, and they had found the way to say yes to life.[436]

The Situationist critique however, made important ideological advances over the increasingly recuperated institutional forms of Marxism. The situation was a creative and utopian exercise in what Negri studies as constituent power. No longer however is the constituent political power of the majority limited to the control over the productive forces,[437] the creation of situations exhibited the desire for the immeasurable and in so doing anticipates a strong element of the post-modern critique of capitalism. As Vaneigem wrote in the Book of Pleasures, “Put a price on something and you kill it”.[438] Love was one of the answers to the tedium of the measurable universe of commodity exchange:

“Measureless, priceless, peerless is its intensity; and brimming with love those whose infinite thirst for pleasure can never be satisfied”.[439]

Although of separate generations and for different reasons, the writings of two prominent Hegelian Marxists, Lukács and Guy Debord, are permeated with a similar foreboding sense of loss, of dissolution and of fragmented existence. Although the theme of alienation predominates in much of the writing of Debord and Vaneigem, the work of the latter is less tied to a Hegelian mode of expression and attempts to give far more of a positive representation of desire and pleasure than can be seen in the writings of Debord. For Vaneigem latter ‘bureaucratic capitalism’ is the tangible reality of alienation, where the satisfaction of material needs has been accompanied by mediocrity, pointless and banal lives.[440] In his article Basic Banalities: the totality for kids he defines the SI as the ‘end of humanity’s term of social alienation.’[441] What he means by social alienation is the system of exclusions and of private appropriation that have defined the development of society in its struggle over nature and over this general canvas reasserts the critique of private appropriation wherein owners maintain their property by the appropriation of the production of non-owners forced to mediate their own survival through the property relation and which has the result of excluding one from being a ‘real person.’[442]

The critique of separation is itself inseparable from a normative totality, an authentic completeness. However with the Situationists this is less of a restoration of lost unity and more about the creation of situations. Here one practice developed was that of détournement, which directly involved the subversive distortion of the estranged and alienated spectacular totality. This was very much interconnected with its own demise. Indeed, the publication that he book, that announced the end of the SI opened with the following thesis: “The Situationist International emerged in a moment of world history as the thought of the collapse of a world, a collapse which has now begun before our eyes.”[443] But the demise of the SI was noted too,

“…The uncompromising critique of everything that exists had come to be positively acknowledged by an ever expanding constituency of losers who had themselves begun to evince revolutionary sympathies.”

This spirit of critique that echoes Marx’s own chosen dictum ‘question everything’ appears to ruin itself, and yet this is perhaps symptomatic of the very uniqueness of the Situationist project. In the introduction to Debord’s film, A Critique of Separation, he says it concerns the particular social experience of a generation born into the spectacle, the boredom of their individual existence; of missed opportunities, wasted time, erasure of their memory and unconscious desires awakened only briefly in dreams.[444] But perhaps more importantly the particular social composition of the Situationists, so erroneously dubbed student pranksters and dismissed,[445] were of the nature that the regime of command they responded to would not be singular but diffuse. That is to say that they had each a different axe to grind and the system, the target of the common practice, the agent of the common repression, could not be conceived in a centred way, it was equally diffuse.[446] Yet in these circumstances too, the centrist Leninist model of organisation became notoriously counterproductive (by most accounts) to the overall success of the project and it has also been suggested that after reading the renaissance authors Castiglione and Gracian in Florence, the main beneficiary of such a model, the Machiavellian Debord, developed an interest in more individualistic forms of conduct away from society as a coherent whole.[447] Debord retained however a strong antipathy to the New Left, so much so that it could be argued that the post- 1968 climes could be seen as a degeneration, an opportunity lost.

In one sense it could be argued that Debord sought to accelerate the process of cultural decomposition.[448] This had already been begun by Lettrism, a movement which, like Ungaretti’s ‘Ermetismo’ sought to further the crisis of representation. Ungaretti called the coming apocalypse of the Second World War a “mad disintegration of words.” [449] The leader of Lettrists were Isidore Isou and Gabriel Pomerand, for whom the development of poetry meant the deconstruction of words to constituent parts, to ‘break a branch and make a tree of it’. Clearly these works of the inter-war period anticipate the 60’s deconstruction of the enlightenment. The same creativity and human urge existed in the views of the Situationists, for whom the Lettrists had failed to distance themselves from art as bourgeois medium.[450]

Although the response to capitalism is seen in the need for authentic creation Situationism is still ensconced in negativity which can be seen in their practices of derive and détournement that presuppose an existing organised system of representation. The criticisms that have been made of Hegelianism so far can be applied to Situationism for Hegelian Marxism and for its uncritical attempt to create through situations an authentic experience, modelled on the projection of the sovereign totality of the self. In fact their form of the dialectics of interiority are questionable in respect to the external influences that create the drive to autonomy. That the situationist critique becomes popular (especially in America) alongside the rise in mass consumerism and the proliferation of the whole psychoanalytical scene, with its management techniques of self- help and spiritual experience of the discovery of identity must be contrasted with its force of refusal, its arrogance and irreverence for authority, its anti-systemic anti state politics, its strangely hierarchical and cult of the leader type of political organisation that followed Breton’s role in surrealism, the elitism and obscurity of its cultural expressions and furthermore the decentred, peripheral nature of the subjectivities involved: made up of the marginal and excluded. The wider societal impact of situationism amongst working class youth in England and autonomist circles in Italy, in extension to the events in Strasbourg and Paris lay in the renewed belief in active constitutive practice but not necessarily to the demise of spectacular society.

Feminism and the demise of totality

In feminism the fate of the notion of totality goes through an accelerated demise; post-modernism is increasingly embraced by feminism within 20 years of its coming on to the scene as a powerful anti-systemic social movement. We can witness a quick decomposition of the original unity of the category of woman and the solidarities associated with it, which encourages the development of a strong epistemological scepticism to simple identity. The following quote is typical of the epistemological problematics of contemporary feminism vis-à-vis the totality. It is also indicative of these positions that they are part of a ‘soft’ post-modern approach to narratives and to systems as necessarily suppressive of difference.

“We cannot simultaneously claim that the mind, the self, and knowledge are socially constituted…and that feminist theory can uncover the truth of the whole….such an absolute truth…would require the existence of an Archimedes point beyond our embeddedness in it from which we could see (and represent) the whole.”[451]

What is crucial about the relation of feminism to postmodernism and totality is the manner in which it has come to fuel challenges to the apparent objectivity and neutrality of a discourse and shows that a theoretical orientation can be a power relation. But it has done this by drawing an identity between what in class terms were perceived as opposing camps. The idea of male power and the totality of patriarchy subsume an apparent difference in power relations into a fundamental unity. In this sense it creates a new focus for practices of social liberation based upon differentiation, dissolution of old ties, of escape and therefore of reconstitution that breaks up the sovereign totality. What is called second wave feminism, as the various attempts at the union of its projects with Marxism attests to, is that it was not hostile to totality as such but to its current manifestation.

To commence with, in the 1960s, feminist thinkers turned to Marxism for a model of social emancipation. There was seen to be much that feminism and Marxism shared, both being attempts to critique society on the basis of an inequality within it, and they shared the character of a movement that saw itself as both theoretical and practical. For a while socialist feminism held sway with writers like Mitchell arguing that women need to ‘ask feminist questions, but try and come up with some Marxist answers’ and in so doing employing categories from the sociological arsenal of work, the family and class. However when socialist feminists began to investigate Marx’s work from the perspective of women, they discovered that the treatment of their issues was at best “scattered, scanty and unsatisfactory.”[452]

Moreover rather than explaining the sexual division of labour, it appeared that the central distinction between productive and unproductive work that Marx employed consigned women to a subordinate role. Moreover, Marx seemed to ‘assume the presence of a housewife’[453] in the reproduction of the worker which remained uncomplicated and un-theorised, and lay outside of the social explanation of capitalism.[454] This led Barrett, an erstwhile supporter of the congruity between Feminism and Marxism, to ‘locate Feminism even more firmly within a liberal humanist tradition.’[455]

The reasons why Marx did not theorise women can be drawn out of the preceding analysis.  Marx was performing an immanent critique of political economy rather than a positive theory and in so doing drew much on the existing conceptualisations of political economy from which the consideration of women as a special subject was equally absent. Moreover the reduction of concrete labours to abstract labour, was premised on a general reduction brought about by factory form of labour, a process of creating the proletariat that in fact saw a tendency towards the inclusion of women (and children) rather than excluding them from the direct process of production. Thus politically speaking it could be said that Marx did not theorise the case of women and feminist issues because he does not conceive of women as a class in and of themselves or indeed that he does not partake in an ideological separation of women from men, although he recognises the practical forms of their separation. Secondly, adopting the polarity between men and women would render the generative expository speculative power of the text through the contradiction between capital and labour utterly nugatory. This is to say that there were in fact two types of division of labour or it would divide the ontologically valid abstraction of the general social form of labour. Thirdly although he does theorise the social force of work that the majority of women did, Marx treats the economic relation as a political relation of force between equal owners of commodities.

In the case of women however, as Fortunati has made clear, they are not owners of their labour power and because they did not share the same formal political rights as men, this would complicate an analysis that Marx is attempting to reduce to analysable social forms. Another reason is that his conception of capitalism as forced socialisation of the workforce pointed toward the collapse of the differential treatment existing in previous divisions of labour, although this is counteracted by the opinion that reproductive work was lacking in any features distinctive to capitalism, hence generally its consignment to a ‘natural‘ realm. Finally, implicit within this latter is that the concentration on only productive work in the consideration of value, even though ‘reproductive work’ creates the conditions for revalorisation of capital, the reverse is not true, supposedly the productive worker rather than capital creates the fund for the reproduction of labour power. Lacking a direct determination in relation to capital the question of the sexual division of labour cannot, or cannot yet be theorised.

The problem of social reproduction that is sidelined in Marx to a natural realm was in the Autonomist tradition reinvestigated as the arcane form of the unwritten productive power of women broadly neglected by social analysis. Marx had omitted ‘half a totality’ and his theories were seen as complicit in the exclusionary logic of a male point of view.[456] This led many feminists to conclude that gender inequality could not be explained through capitalism alone.[457] Nevertheless, this did not stop feminists like Dalla Costa from attempting to integrate domestic labour into the analytics of surplus value production wherein the argument runs that through the sustenance of workers and future workers, domestic labour contributes to the exchange value of the commodity thus allowing it to be said that women are exploited alongside the working class. Feminists like West, Dalla Costa and Vogel felt that by this strategy the struggle of women could be integrated in class politics. Despite these attempts the marriage between Marxism and feminism as Harstock called it, turned out to be an unhappy one, and analysis of productive relations was generally felt to be inadequate to explaining the oppression of women.

The difference between the analysis of class and the analysis of women is that in the case of the former the content of the category is social whereas in the case of women this is not so easy to sustain. Increasingly disaffected with the subordinate role women had in official working class movements and their theory, feminism began to witness an upsurge in forms of essentialist thinking about women and what united them.[458] One of the assumptions of early second wave feminism was that women either shared a set of positive qualities or a social experience from which their potential solidarity could be built. Criticising these biological and socially constructed notions of woman, Judith Grant argues that feminist theory is ‘multi-centred and indefinable’.[459] And yet the prioritisation of certain feminine qualities became a catalyst for the breakdown of single and unitary modes of struggle. By the 1980s this amounted to a powerful critique of working class strategy from Unions to Leninism. In the view of Sheila Rowbottom the vanguard party, in its resistance to centralised organisation, limits self- organisation and development of most of its members. She argued that “the woman’s movement has broken the circle of the concept of the vanguard Party by questioning the criteria used in assessing the meaning of ‘advance’ and ‘backward’ and arguing that this assessment is not a neutral and objective process but matter of subjective control.”[460] Leninism typified a centralised model of organisation that was intrinsically disposed to name and impose categories over heterogeneity.

The concept of patriarchy as a total system replicated some of the features of earlier totalising critiques of social life. Even if for the likes of radical feminists like Catherine McKinnon sex was to women what work was to Marxism, the system was only ‘total’ from the standpoint of women, and moreover, because the object of critique became male power itself, the form of the totality was diffuse and lacked a centre. Moreover, given the seemingly timeless nature of women’s subordination, the notion of a historically specific social cause to women’s oppression connected to capitalism became impossible to sustain, and large divisions have opened up in feminist thought on how the two totalities of capitalism and patriarchy could exist side by side.[461] The theoretical incongruities accelerated the passage to post-modern approaches to knowledge. As Iris Young argues, the very ‘desire for unity or wholeness in discourse generates borders, dichotomies and exclusions.’[462] This induced a challenge to the whole manner of perceiving subjectivity where in some versions it became quickly understood that ‘a concept of a coherent inner-self, achieved (cultural) or innate (biological), is a regulatory fiction that is unnecessary.”[463]

But what made this transition so intensive (and so characteristic of the decomposition of simple identity) was the veracity and communicability of its politics. This intensity is reflected in the deconstruction of the category of ‘we’ and the various attempts to construe a working politics of difference from the many ‘feminisms.’[464] That the predominant theoretical discourse of feminism (at least in academia) should become post-modern then, whilst equally concerned with the ontological status of women as a category and as a political subject, is not altogether surprising when the initial premise of the social subjectivity was a universality that formed a totality based on a common identity and a common project of liberation. The assumption of oppression grounds this commonality of women through negative identity, which as a conclusion sits uncomfortably with the paradigm of power, it appears to give over to it the very definition of what is common. This is expressed perfectly in an exchange between the radical feminist Catherine Mackinnon and Gilligan reported by Benhabib.[465]

Gilligan wants an essentialist account of woman that can be a positive foundation for subjectivity outside the imposition of simple identity. Mackinnon sees the only possibility for subjectivity in making explicit the mechanism of subjectification – the subject of resistance is equally the subject of oppression. In Mackinnon’s account there is an identity between the process of power and the process of subjectivation – this needs to be retained. For Gilligan the non- identity needs to be asserted. However, both struggle for an immanent basis to identity/ being for itself – expressive totality.

The insights and work of feminist theory over the last forty years has had another effect. It has put on the map another type of work relation under capitalism that some postmodernists see as becoming particularly characteristic of the contemporary developed western societies. That women’s work was directly concerned with care, reproduction and affect and thus had no working separation between the public and private, and was a 24 hour job so to speak, it becomes a model of the paradigm of the increasingly prevalent capitalist form of labour governing immaterial work. In the work of Judith Revel which rubs shoulders with Negri, labour, like politics, goes through a process of becoming woman, a Deleuzian feminisation.

The return to production

Negri's thought is a non-transcendental post-modern Marxism. The guiding principle in much of his writings is the insistence on the role of constituent power in any politics of the prevailing social mode of production. Negri theorises power from 'below', his politics always attuned to understanding the shifts in established power as the result of the creative, generative and constitutive power of people themselves. One of Negri's strengths lies in his focus on the social form and relations of production whilst at the same time registering alternative modes of perceiving these relations - outside the canonical Hegelian Marxism frame to which they have been sutured. Negri’s contribution to the understanding of Spinoza and in turn his critique of Marx has important implications for our understanding of dialectical theory and his proposals for an immanent ontology of power. Taking from Spinoza the notion of totality as an immanent cause with no outside and critically from Marx’s Grundrisse the dynamic role of the class activity in shaping the development of the productive forces, Negri’s interventions have always been directed to the here and now. Anathema to this philosophy is any politics of separation that seeks to divorce the power of constitutive activity from its effects in this or that state or economic policy.

If Negri's work shares deep affinities and was a part of the theoretical revolutions in French thought in the 60s and 70s, he has tended to avoid the scepticism about social change that characterises so many readings of post-modern theory.[466] Post-modernism, now universalised as definition of every theory that registers a new periodisation of economic and political realities is appropriated by Negri to describe the new conditions of possibility for social emancipation. Although drawing on the anti-representationalism within critiques of hierarchical teleological totalities, this version of postmodernism has little to do with the question of aesthetics and the avant-garde.[467] Rather here post-modernism refers to the identification of a new configuration of the forces and relations of production, a new state of society or its condition as in the sense used by Harvey[468] or Jameson. But the body of concepts that Negrian critique perceives as adequate to this world draw strongly on the themes of what we have called aleatory materialism, and are expressions of a different re-orientated understanding of subjectivity that explode dialectical representations of post-modernity and its ambivalences over the nature of post-modern subjectivity. The strength of this contribution is that its conception of subjectivity is not undermined in the face of the globalised and totalised force of the world market, and yet nor does it succumb to viewing those forces as either inevitable or desirable. In this conception the becoming total of a system is not seen to destroy subjectivity, power can not be absolutised once and for all but must be continually re-enacted in the present in the face of its effects.

Total Subsumption

The interiorisation of the outside and the absolute domination of capital over all productive forms is what is understood by ‘total subsumption’, and it is seen by Negri as a development on Marx’s discussion of formal and real subsumption.[469] Total subsumption is crucial to Negri’s argument because it combines both of these approaches: that of a genealogy of the present[470] and ontology of an immanent materialism expressing the form of power. Even though we recognise many similarities to other theories of the post-modern, whose deconstructive practice is itself paradoxically premised on the assumption of a meta change in the social, we argue that Negri’s approach is radically different from these, since ‘change’ is understood through the correct analysis of the processes that preceded and produced it. Rather than theorising technological developments and innovations as themselves causes of change, the central dynamic within society - the red thread of Negri’s analysis - is understood as the developing contradiction and contestation between the creative activity and strength of people and the responsive mechanisms of regulation that feed off and limit its power. In contradistinction to both this technological view of progress and the culture based interpretation of the postmodern, Negri’s stance never allows the question to ever leave the total domain of the political.

Total subsumption as the absolute domination of capital coincides with the interiorisation of the outside. With nothing outside of capital left for it to colonise, exploitation and capital’s expansion must assume a new intensive form. The import of total subsumption is really the end of a dialectic between inside and outside. For Negri and others who similarly understand modernity as a finished project, nature and extra-social elements are no longer,

‘Seen as original and independent of the artifice of the civil order. In a post-modern world, all phenomena and forces are artificial, or, as some might say, part of history. The modern dialectic of inside and outside has been replaced by a play of degrees and intensities, of hybridity and artificiality.’[471]

The reality of this dialectical impasse is profound in that it provokes a radical reordering of our understanding of power. The crux of the Negrian idea of total subsumption is that it is treated politically. It has already been shown in the discussion of the politics of the law of value how Negri’s treatment of the issue aims to go beyond the speculative construction of the categories. Indeed, ‘The theory of value as a theory of categorical synthesis, is a legacy of the classics and of the bourgeois mystifications which we can easily do without in order to enter the field of revolution’.[472] He prefers to draw on the Grundrisse, the text that makes stand out ‘the primary practical antagonism within whatever categorical foundation’.[473]

Not only does capital appear in some Marxisms to be a separate and alien power, it is theorised as such and, in other apocalyptic Marxisms, has itself replaced class itself as a form of expressive totality. The logical necessities of an analytical method for the comprehension of object of capital are transposed into the ideal self -positing subjectivity of the absolute. This all-embracing interiority is attributed to the power of capital rather than the substantive activity of human beings and reflects the apparent impossibility of cognising power outside of adopting its perspective. In today's times, this power is seen as so powerful and complete that even the state is impotent to challenge it. It has been argued that Jameson’s idea of post-modernism enacts exactly this type of totalisation.[474]

Though singing a familiar tune to Cleaver [475] and Lebowitz,[476] for Negri, Das Kapital represents such an attempt to elucidate the system from above, from the perspective of capital itself. Counterpoised to this is a political insistence on the necessity of a view from 'below'.[477] There is no question about where Negri stands with respect to orthodox schools of Marxist thought, although at times there are similar concerns. He is concerned with the social form of value and the form of labour that creates it. Yet far from fixing the value form to an essence of capital Negri constantly tries to identify where and why the law of value is in crisis, and the movements within the relations themselves that determine new configurations of labour. The object of Negri’s Marxism has not been to hypostasise the law of value but to continuously deconstruct it, both in theory and practice.[478]

For a number of post-modernists, this deconstruction has produced or aided a move away from the consideration of economic conflict over social power. Yet for Negri it is the reverse, because the law of value is the site of conflict, wherein capital, through measure, attempts to reduce human beings to homogenous simple labour.

This focus on labour and sensitivity to its changing forms means that Negri, unlike other post-modern theorists, does not find himself in the position of having to look outside of the capital relation for the subject that will have to transcend it. The view from above, whether the economic objectivism or the idea of total commodification in the Frankfurt School has the tendency to cancel out subjectivity from within the capital relation. That Marx himself made this mistake in Das Kapital - to the point that Negri can argue Marx’s theory of value was really a theory of the measure of value - has led Lebowitz and others to accuse Marx of an unhealthy collusion with the bourgeois categories of political economy.[479] That both modernists and post-modernists draw apocalyptic conclusions from the reality of total subsumption makes Negri’s reconsideration of production all the more welcome. Undeniably capital has power, but in itself the substance of its power is never anything but the appropriated productive power of people.

For Negri the relentless expansion of capital since the 1960s - its drive to interiorise its outside - has an increasing intensity to it.[480] However, the basis of this expansion is the conflict internal to capital itself, because the need of capital to colonise the outside is due to the resistance inside the capital relation to its attempts to reduce the value of labour. We could say that ‘Empire’, as a world historical actuality, arises when the consequent drive of capitalist social power to colonise the outside is complete. This tendency is given by contradictory elements within the capital relation: the overproduction/ under-consumption problem, namely the tension in capital wherein the need to de-valorise labour power reduces the market for its products amongst those consumers internal to its relation (i.e. wage labourers).[481] This is not a new problem, in many ways the whole discourse of post-modern Marxism hangs on this question. However, what makes Negri’s argument stand out is its capacity to treat total subsumption politically without having to abandon politics. For many, the totalisation of capital relations entails either an abandonment of anti-capitalist politics in the face of their perceived impotence and futility, or the celebration of this or that conciliatory political project, often consisting in the reinvention of a public sphere or the power of consumer choice.[482] For Negri, on the contrary, totalisation of capitalism makes communism an immanent historical possibility.[483]  How can this be so?

The answer lies in the fact that capital does not expand in spite of class struggle but as a direct consequence of it. For Negri, each development in capital’s re-structuration is a consequence of its need to contain class struggle. Capital’s laws are always in crisis, because in essence they rely on an imposition of social power upon subjects whose needs and desires always expose work, power and command as exterior limitation.[484] Capital does not reign supreme over labour as a transcendental force but is in a continuous battle within society to allow for its valorisation, to stem the crisis of the law of value.

Shifts in the capitalist form of production and in the political form of the state in turn are premised upon the struggle with the working class; the drive to exploitation and technical development aim to negate both the subversive power of workers and the struggle over wages, as well as the ideological conflict. The demise of conventional union based struggles over wages, does not stem the fact that productive subjects are continuously upsetting the operation of the law of value, even if in today’s circumstances the contest over the free time of life has a more individualistic basis. The talk show rhetoric of self-help is used in justification of adverse behaviour, the politics of identity for special dispensation, the growth in illnesses of abuse or discrimination all elements of control that are turned around by people to use for their own interests. Subversion is carried out on the terrain where power tries to establish itself, power is only meaningful where there is counter- power. The techniques of power can be reversed. These relations on a broader scale inform our perception of class. The working class responds to the factory regime through political homogenisation, through creating demands for equality of wage and right to work, the creation of its body as unified form of subject, that capital in turn tries to divide or undermine, by changing the nature of its productive forces or their location or by creating hierarchies of power within the working class.[485] The working class demands freedom and uses its collective power as a force to gain real reductions in time at work, the growth of its purchasing power and the increase in free time. (these are ever more present today, but have a much more individualist basis to them - i.e., the worker will take a day or longer off sick, fake a dental appointment, sabotage a computer system, set off a fire alarm to gain freedom). The more individualised form of this resistance today is to the degree of the socialisation of the form of production away from the factory regime, and the corresponding degree of consciousness is reflected in more narrow individual interests than collective ones. Challenges to the system are political, but not conceived as determinate forms of political transformation to a better society, but simply as self- interested distribution of production. Crime, and fraud, theft of resources are rife and these are minor but significant ways that the worker’s attempt at the improvement of the quality of his life directly affects the functioning and profitability of capital. Losing files, corrupting disks, setting off fire alarms, mislaying keys, falsifying work time chits, lying about skills and experience, ripping off property, turning up late, knocking off early, manipulating flexible labour, and life-long education (training in order to get out of work).[486] These new forms of disruption and resistance are figures of the increasing importance of those elements previously marginalized by the political centrality of the industrial working class, and it speaks of practices as diverse as those of the Situationists and the Black Panthers.[487]

This can be linked directly with refusal and its importance in the constitution of social relations and contrasted with Habermas’s discussion of the theories of Mead wherein refusal only produces new relations of association and communities. [488] However, refusal is equally constitutive in its role of abandoning the site of power, and in so doing escaping the dialectic of negativity by creating vacuums of power and crises of legitimacy through its multiple lines of flight.

The priority of productive power as ontology of social practice

This complex is termed the couplet ‘workers struggle /capitalist development’ and was the theoretical product of, amongst others, Mario Tronti and the regulation school.[489] Far from the burgeoning view of capital as an encroaching Leviathan or spirit with a fatalist drive, Negri’s thought recovers the various resistances to this encroachment and reverses the apparent omnipresence of capital. Rather than innovative in and of itself, capitalist strategy is a response to political and social collectivities that struggle against it, refuse it or abandon it through migration. Capital dominates and recuperates because it needs to, as the attempt at the rule of dead labour over the living, it is confronted by living, feeling, hoping and despairing, needful and desiring subjects that it cannot reduce to a predictable magnitude of profit. With this insistence on the productive priority of labour, especially given its increasingly knowledge/ affect based character, what is elsewhere considered as the total colonisation by capital, is revised to encompass the social power and resistances of the many. In this view, it is not necessary to adopt the perspective of capital to explain its expansion.[490] When the schema workers struggle/ capitalist development is placed in comparison to the more fatalist view, what emerges is a mutual process of development. That shows whatever power drive is enacted in one case, is responded to in the other. Negri’s tendency is to devalue the power of capital to the point of asserting the absolute priority of productive power. This emphasis has been important to subverting the one sided view, but in placing such an emphasis on labour Negri moves beyond a central tenet of Marx’s thought that the wage-labour capital relation is reciprocally determining as exhibited for instance in the pamphlet Wage Labour and Capital:

"…Capital presupposes wage-labour and wage-labour presupposes capital. They mutually condition one another; they mutually bring each other into existence."[491]

And yet Marx himself was concerned to address the imbalance that on his account was an inherently mystifying form of bourgeois social relations, namely that they themselves create the myth that commodities, money, or industrial capital are the real force of the productive process.[492] Here Negri is close to Marx and there is a deep political connection too. Workers produce wealth and reproduce society; this production is mediated by capital, but the social aggregation and cooperation of workers pushes past the divisions capitalist society engenders. A different social system is immanently present and possible and it has as its basis the productive power of the working class.

Since Negri’s first writings, the dialectic that places ontological primacy on the productive labouring, desiring, self- generating but relational subject would have been the challenge or alternative to modernity – this is ‘materialism’.[493] Ever positioned in the view from below, and true to his own prescriptions of viewing the political nexus of productive subjectivity, Negri’s work from the 1960s to today charts the unknown, lambasted and denied waters of this subversive power of materialism.

In order to put Negri’s insistence on the priority of productive power in some perspective we need to investigate how the historical instantiations of the relations of production in modern times can be characterised by treating the capital relation from below, a method whose crucial operative concepts are class composition[494] and the state form.

Three main periods of capitalist re-structuration and class re-composition are outlined. Perhaps the most familiar is the period of the mass worker, which coincides with the Fordist/ Taylorist regime, preceded by the professional worker/artisan and superseded by post-Fordism which tries to find its political resolution in ‘Empire’. Most of Marx’s analysis of labour and capital corresponds to the period of the emergence of the mass worker.[495] The struggles that unfold during this period cause the emergence of the figure of the ‘social worker’ and equal the deconstruction of the category of the ‘mass worker’  - both theoretically and within the social field so to speak. All this coincides with the 1960’s and the coming to be of the living generation in the seat of power whose dreams and nightmares we make our own.

Factory society

With factory society and the emergence of the mass worker,[496] the artificial separation between political and economic constitution loses its effectiveness. No mediation is necessary; accumulation is its own discipline. The state as the executive organ of capital represents the direct negation of single capitalists, in favour of the class interests of capital. It embodies the ‘political law of collective capital’. Capital becomes synonymous with the general interest.

‘The ‘democracy of labour’ and ‘social democracy’ both reside here: they consist of the hypothesis of a form of labour that negates itself as the working class and autonomously manages itself within the structures of capitalist production as labour-power. At this point capitalist social interest, which has already eliminated the privatistic and egoistic expressions of single capitalists, attempts to configure itself as a comprehensive, objective social interest.’

At the point where capital is identified with the common interest of society, an inversion occurs in the realm of social phenomenology wherein the labour nexus appears as the strength of capital’s valorisation and the basis of society itself. [497] This is reflected in the incorporation of the socialist principles like labour being the source of all wealth – that Marx incidentally had already taken up in the Critique of the Gotha Programme – into principles with Bourgeois democratic constitutions.[498] This notion is progressively deconstructed in the 1960’s and the following years, when the factory regime is attacked across the West. Against the tyranny of both Trade Unions and the Party, we witness the birth of autonomism and the creation of resistance cultures that refuse the very ideology of social democracy, organised labour and their motto: Arbeit macht frei.[499]

Work is a four- letter word

‘Ne Travaillez, jamais’[500]

As we have seen, the dialectics of Das Kapital and much functionalist social theory theorised alienated labour as an interiorisation into the control of capital. Parsons gave a striking description of this idea when he argued that by entering into a wage-labour contract the worker was showing a form of solidarity with his employer. A different aspect of this was presented in the discussion of the circulation and reproductive cycles in Volume I where Marx can reduce the worker’s activity to variable capital, i.e. as a practice always analysed from the point of view of its consummation in the production of value.[501] Furthermore the liberal tradition in political theory models society on the basis of a contract between prior and isolated individuals, which although possibly based on coercion, can be ideally represented as a positive decision towards association. Scientific orientation to this form of association that was seen in the sociology of Simmel, Durkheim and Parsons and comes out of a notion of society as a reproducing whole neglects what might be described as negative association. The refusal of cooperation can be equally constitutive of social relations as those that stem from either from an instrumental or value basis of social solidarity. These types of refusal do not readily appear in sociological accounts of its object. 

There is a rich tradition of thought and practice of refusal that stands opposed to these theories of the measurable. Often constitution of political systems and of society is understood only in its positive moment. Our argument is that the attempt at the refusal of the totality, or indeed total refusal as in Dada and Situationist movements, must be equally seen as constitutive forces in the formation of the nature of social and political life. There is already a precedent to this view in the Marcusian notion of the aesthetic as the Grand Refusal. However, the development of anti-systemic movements and systematic refusal that proliferate in the post-war period and reach their height in the late 60s and early 70s can not be reduced to cultural protest and even in the case of Dada, Surrealism and Situationism were directed to the re-appropriation of a unity from separated existence. The figure of the multitude aptly captures the force of these movements of refusal as much as attempts by authority to recuperate what Negri calls its ‘absolute democratic’ potential into legitimacy for sovereign power. And yet, because it shuns representation, the figures of refusal are difficult to represent systematically, and often appear as dispersed, local and insignificant movements that cannot appear foundational in any way to social life.

Historically it is important to show in this context, the link between the breakdown of class with the break down of class identity.[502] Far left and autonomist political movements develop in response to and refusal of the factory form of work with powerful implications for all mediated forms like Trade Unions wherein their aspirations are tied to the system. Often part of Utopian currents, the politics of the refusal of work such as that expressed in Bob Black’s Manifesto against Work, try to shatter the link between work and social cooperation and propose to liberate desire from its series of political mediations, whether money or neo-liberal ideology. In the work of Bataille steeped in negation and developing out of Dada’s utter contempt for all that exists, the nature of work as the trans-historical means of satisfying needs is rewritten in order to demonstrate the intrinsic link between labour and the inhibition of desire. In the context of the theory of capitalism as the historical inversion of the pre-modern norm of unproductive consumption, Bataille describes how work itself was a form that mediated between the individual and collective social experience. Work is a force that represses the drive to wild impulses to excess; it is full of promise but defers gratification and involves a type of collectivity that by necessity creates taboo.[503] What is reduced in Hegel, Marx and Sartre to either logical necessity or social need in the form of scarcity, is the contradiction between the worker’s need for work and his desires beyond work. In the absence of the mythical unity of the experience of the sacred an ethic of productive accumulation and expenditure characterises capitalist society and critiques of it alike. 

Following Tronti’s explicit theorisation of workplace refusal as the refusal of formal forms of political mediation, Negri and Hardt have increasingly emphasised the importance of refusal to their overall theorisation of class composition. However they go further than Tronti by recognising the diffusion of the struggle for creating a ‘class against capital’ into all areas of capitalist social life.[504] Hardt regards the refusal of authority as essential to the constitution of society.[505] But this refusal of authority takes a multitude of forms none of which on their own seem to amount to total refusal. For instance the Situationist experiments, such as détournement, described as the ‘praxis of theory’ (theory being total critique) were refusals of authority,[506] but given their own theory of the diffuse nature of spectacular society their effect was of necessity partial and furthermore, it is important to note, later recuperated into the very organisation of expression itself in all manner of post-modern promotion in the industries of affect in capitalist society.

To elements of the labour movement, liberalism and Stalinist Marxism refusal has been either actively suppressed or ignored, because all at some point seek to harness the general social productive power. Refusal is seen only as impotence before the totality and rarely as the basis of innovation or new forms of combination.[507] It is certainly in the latter sense that Hardt and Negri have begun to use refusal, as well as in more Deleuzian themes of exodus and abandonment of the site of power. However Nicholas Thoburn is right to point out that in the theorisation of the immaterial economy, where production is directly the production of a social relation and in Negri’s terms a potential site of self-valorisation, the strategy of the refusal of work becomes complicated, perhaps to the point of being untenable.[508] However the transition from disciplinary society to control society opens up new modalities and areas of exploitation that can only be refused by new methods of agitation.

Society of control and immaterial labour

Whilst the factory society corresponded to the Fordist mechanisms of labour exploitation, which attempted to homogenise labour and break down the power of the professional worker,[509] the society of control corresponds and is a response to the movement away from the ‘productive labourer’ (as specifically theorised by Marx)[510] as the essential substance of the alienated labour that produces value and surplus value.[511]

When Negri and Hardt look at bio-political production under post-Fordism, it is precisely at the point where this process has reached its apex. Equipped with a general intelligence and ability to solve problems and moreover with the moral capacity to know of and create affect, the body of the labourer is no longer variable dispensable capital but rather a form of fixed capital that must be set to work on by the employer in order to maximise the value creating potential contained therein.[512] The power of discipline within the factory form was productive of subjectivities within institutions: it had to be contained within a ‘place’. Control on the other hand involves the harnessing of subjectivities that are not necessarily produced within the space of power. In circumstances where the worker is morally interiorised to capitalist command an internalised disciplinary function is often the criterion for employment. Moreover, where production is complex at the level of each abstract unit, the operators must equally act as the police. This is the clearest consequence of control within information networks, wherein the specialisation renders the traditional methods of policing ineffective.

With this new regime of labour the working class through the endeavour of its own agents collapses the privileged sector of the Fordist worker and instantiates new forms of subjectivities, a different class composition.  Negri is decisive about the periodisation in the movement towards the social worker. The fact that he locates it in 1968 shows the persistent political dimension of his thought about reality and the importance of the event. The 1970’s marked a pretty bloody period in what were the staged battles of this transition. Against the powerful labour force, the crisis state became centralised as a constant reality. But what is more crucial perhaps is the birth of struggles outside of the factory, which was reflected in the extension of the state administration of discipline (now control) into directly managing the production of subjectivity, whilst (and as a response to) subjects resisting the reduction of themselves to their labour power.

 ‘The political composition of the proletariat is social, as is also the territory where it resides; it is completely abstract, immaterial, and intellectual, in terms of the substance of labour; it is mobile and polyvalent in terms of its form.’ [513]

The idea of immaterial labour comes to be theorised as a result of the changes in the quality of labour brought about by what Hardt and Negri call the post-modernization/ informatization of the economy. The Italian tradition of Operaismo links the notion of immaterial labour to the move from Fordist to lean production or Toyotism (just-in-time production), where prior to being manufactured, a product must be sold. The main requirement for the introduction of this model is the establishment of a system of communication between production and consumption, between factories and markets. The kind of immaterial labour involved in the industry primarily entails the transmission of data, which dictates that an increasing proportion of capital must be invested in the increasing the power of communicative techniques, corresponding to the increasingly cerebral nature of labour. Immaterial labour refers to two different aspects of labour. As Lazzarato says:

‘As regards the activity that produces the ‘cultural content’ of the commodity, immaterial labour involves a series of activities that are not normally recognised as ‘work’ - in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and more strategically, public opinion.’[514]

The idea that immaterial labour directly produces the conditions of possibility for the capital relation, (with material labour this was clandestine) changes the phenomenology of capital and the substance of its social power. This is because immaterial workers are primarily producers of subjectivity and only secondly producers of capital. This third aspect of immaterial labour is what constitutes its ‘affective’ character. Affective labour is that ‘embedded in moments of human interaction and communication’. It acts wherever human contact is required, it is essentially involved with ‘producing social networks, forms of community and bio-power. What is created in the networks of affective labour is a form-of-life.’[515]

‘If production today is directly the production of a social relation, then the ‘raw material’ of immaterial labour is subjectivity and the ‘ideological’ environment in which subjectivity lives and reproduces. The production of subjectivity ceases to be only an instrument of social control (for the production of mercantile relationships) and becomes directly productive, because the goal of our post-industrial society is to construct the consumer/communicator -and to construct it as ‘active’. Immaterial workers (those who work in advertising, fashion, marketing, television, cybernetics, and so forth) satisfy a demand by the consumer and at the same time establish that demand.’ [516]

Affective labour ends the dominating tendency in the measure of value that was only appropriate to the time when labour was outside of capital and needed to be reduced to labour power.[517]This is where bio-political production is directly involved with the production of social relations, and where it becomes coextensive with social reproduction.  ‘Empire’ is the process representing the totalisation of the corresponding command over this form: since concrete work is different in Empire, mechanisms of social control are interiorised and reproduced within subjectivities. The bio-political notions of life and body are determined in the political constitution and in the real daily affirmations of social subjectivity.

Potestas and constituted power

Total subsumption is not simply the economic triumph of capitalism; its conditions are equally the demise of the political agency of class- based approaches to systemic social change. However the increasing redundancy of working class politics can not be represented as simply a triumph over labour, it is also theorised as having broken down from within working class organisation. That is to say the struggles against the factory form of work forced a transformation in the form of work, the nature of capitals and the forms of state.

Under total subsumption, understood as a colonisation of the inside and outside by global capital, it is impossible – even analytically - to detach economic and political power. A critique of power must entail a critique of labour. So the significance and determination of the total subsumption of society also resides in the de-actualisation of the conventionalised form of political space – here the nation state as the locus of democratic power. Total subsumption is a political moment through and through. It develops out of the generalisation of the factory regime of command, (which has the social state using the capitalist reformist integration of the official labour movement, and thus changes the nature of the particular exercise of that command) transforming the state function.

Here lies the end of the myth of the liberal autonomy of the political, or the separation of the public from the private, wherein the individual regarded the public as his outside. In this conception, “the outside is the place proper to politics, where the action of the individual is exposed in the presence of others and there seeks recognition.” [518]In explaining this post-modern abandonment of the private/ public distinction - characterised by the deficit of the 'political,’ Debord is the explicit point of reference.[519] The public sphere proper evaporates as:

”The spectacle destroys any collective form of sociality - individualizing social actors in their separate automobiles and in front of separate video-screens - and at the same time imposes a new mass sociality, a new uniformity of action and thought.”[520]

When all aspects of life are subsumed by capital, all forms of action become immediately meaningful to the reproduction of that society - they are all socially productive.[521] Historically, the 'autonomy of the political' satisfied the need to fill in the gap left by the ‘demise of class politics’. Paradoxically, when the private sphere is ideologically destroyed, or is fully socialised (subsumed), the reactionary political elements in reformism repose the issue as one of recreation of the public sphere as the political arena.  In the present, the idea of the autonomy of the political could only be some form of liberalism; it could only function in the parameters as outlined in Marx's critique of Hegel's philosophy of the state i.e. the separation of decisions about the community from our existence as productive agents. Liberalism, however, does not sever the political from interest; in fact it continues to reorganise it according to private individual interests. The discourse on power becomes the balance between individual right and duty (the latter only a modern incarnation of the latter). Social movements that claim to be communitarian[522] need to present their programs in terms of an ethical life and limitations to individual self-pursuit. They propose politics as a narrowing activity (anti-globalisation=pro democracy), and undermine universality in the guise of impartiality and neutrality of the state by demanding a special treatment on the basis of identity, through a demand for a ‘defensive’ democracy of state regulation.[523] This is also paradigmatic of a reinvigoration of the legitimacy of the sovereignty of a crisis state.

Through immanent criticism, Negri takes this a stage further. The analysis of production in terms of social cooperation re-politicises the politics of interest in non individualist terms whilst purifying it of its moralist tendencies, whilst also refusing to reduce battles over interest to matters of identity politics, no matter how much agents describe their own actions in these terms. We recognise that the relations of social movements to the state are ambiguous.[524] Whilst they provide an opportunity for the state to repose itself as arbitrator in neutral terms, they also look for institutional recognition, which is potestas in operation within a liberal context. That is why Negri’s insistence on reposing labour politics in non-identity terms is crucial, together with his emphasis on production and the corresponding recognition that the production of subjectivities and identities occurs fully under the generalised form of command appropriate to capital. In so far as these movements are political in a subversive-transformative sense, they are absolutely embedded within the social determinations of their subjectivities.

Jameson from a cultural political perspective looks at the same process as the formation of new identities made possible by the failure of universalising force of class and the demise of its institutional and organisational forms. Yet that the ‘great explosions of the 60’s have led, in the worldwide economic crisis, to powerful restorations of the social order and a renewal of the repressive power of the various state apparatuses’ is treated almost as an incidental appendage to the process of the interiorisation of the outside.[525]  Moreover, the ‘sense of freedom and possibility – which is for the course of the 60’s a momentarily objective reality, as well as (from the hindsight of the 80’s) a historical illusion’ is restricted admittedly with the cynicism of the dark ages of the 80’s, in terms of the ‘superstructural movement and play enabled by the transition from one infrastructural or systemic stage of capitalism to another.’[526]Jameson does analyse total subsumption in terms of a new configuration of the mechanisms of containment that issue from newly unleashed subjectivities. Negri has it thus:

"Today the working class has all but disappeared from view. It has not ceased to exist, but it has been displaced from its privileged position in capitalist economy and its hegemonic position in the class composition of the proletariat. The proletariat is not what it used to be but that does not mean it has vanished." [527]

The displacement of the industrial working class occurs through the neutralisation of its productive role in the attempt by capital to sever its dependence on the agency of labour. The category of the proletariat is expanded to contain the whole class of people who internally sustain capitalist relations of production and are subject to its discipline. This is in no sense an abandonment of anti-systemic struggle, steeped as it is in total refusal. Negri’s critique of power constantly displaces its points of attack. Power is never presented solely from the perspective of a limitation because limitations produce differential responses and as such presuppose a potential capacity that the limitation is exterior to. The form of domination of constituted power is always contextualized in the possibilities of resistance and creation that it opens up and never reduced to the mask that power itself wears. The formal exercise of Power, or potestas, is only ever set in motion in response to the creative energy it tries to contain.

The radical immateriality of post-Fordist labour creates Empire in response to its lines of flight, exodus and refusal, the sensuous movement, miscegenation and diversification of the productive subject. Capital in its bloodthirsty expansion, its cooption of the outside, falls prey to its greatest adversary yet: the multitude, the living breathing mass, which it would destroy itself to conquer.[528] At the level of labour, the productive subject that constitutes the political form of Empire has social cooperation as its absolute basis. Networks of information and communication form the marrow of every element in the synthesised and globalised productive space. Immaterial labour and affective labour are the basis for the collapse of mediation: justification becomes an immanent affair.[529] The myth of a realm of public space as negotiating ground finally decomposes.[530] The social state in its traditional guise sweats under the burden of the management of differentiating subjectivities to the point of dehydration.[531] Participative management is a technology of power, a technology for creating and controlling the subjective processes.’[532] But productive cooperation is at once indispensable and destabilising for post-Fordist production.

Under Empire the object of power becomes life itself, which is why for Negri politics is ontological. Empire has no centre, and represents more a network of power relations governed by a mixed constitution. The thesis of Empire describes an order where the nation state is increasingly ineffective as a means for the ordering of subjectivities and Empire points to a trans-national and abstract order of political right and force which has no centre and functions through networks even though certain of its elements have a privileged position of power in certain domains. Capital becomes indifferent to state power.

Empire is hierarchical and one of the privileged sectors is of course the USA, but at the bottom end of its operation, at its ‘capillary points’ lie institutions like NGOs that displace the traditional power of the nation state.[533] The Negrian theorisation of power, that draws on Spinoza’s metaphysics as much as his politics for its critique of transcendental and hierarchical models of sovereignty and authority, develops the decentred yet dynamic idea that sees expression/ productive activity as cause, as self determination, confronting the external limitations or attempts to govern it. Yet it is paradoxically only by positing the complete totalisation of the capitalist relation, that it can present the new divisions of labour and systems of social control as differentiated singularities that are not reducible to a sovereign totality governing reality. Where life itself is the object of power, the contestation over the everyday and over all forms of mediation; party, state, union, class become part and parcel of life itself. At the point of a total interiority of a relation, totality as a horizon and a structure can no longer direct itself to a centre of established power. In such circumstances the drive to totality turns into a drive of exteriority, to combination to difference within the interior. Identity has no place here because the universal is not a transcendental horizon; universals only exist as abstractions from or impositions on the lived experience of subjectivity. 

Abstractions of right, alienation and representation

In the classical conception, sovereignty is established through an alienation of an original right. In Hobbes’s thought the sovereign must be absolute as must be the act of transferring right. In this notion, the sovereign has therefore right grounded in natural law. In Hegel’s conception, as in Spinoza’s, political right is not alienated to the state, and right is beyond the monarchical sovereignties in the sense that divine authority is placed not above but alongside individual practical actions of citizens who participate in the state. It is this idea of the embodiment of political will as unitary subjectivity that marks the similarity of Hegel with the young Marx.[534] Indeed both admire Rousseau. But rather than critiquing this notion itself in Hegel, Marx simply displaces it on to a material horizon. In so doing however an opening was made for non-liberal critiques of totalitarianism. In societies organised on the alienation of private labour power, political emancipation requires emancipation from private property:

“Only when real, individual man resumes the abstract citizen into himself and as an individual man has become a species being in his empirical life, his individual work and his individual relationships, only when man has recognised and organised his forces propres [Rousseau] so that social force is no longer separated from him in the form of political force, only then will human emancipation be completed.”[535]

In these early writings on the question of political emancipation, the Jewish Question and Hegel’s theory of the state, the critique is of the alienation of species being. Although this is imagined as a step forward in history, rather than a return to a natural and harmonious state, the imagination is informed by a kind of reconciliation of a division between people that had the potential to organise social life without the mediation of private labour for money. The idea of the alienation of a species-being is thoroughly utopian because it is an alienation from a future potential social unity; one that is perceived as already existing yet in a distorted or un-realised form. In the post-humanist discourse of the social such a claim is problematic and an increasingly undesirable way of thinking about social reality.

The specific difficulties of upholding the idea of alienation within social thought lie in the constraints of Hegelian negativity as well as a utopian notion of authenticity. Above all a dialectical notion, and thus arguably trapped on the track of a certain form of contradiction, alienation is an untenable notion because it results in a description of aspects of social reality as not being what they were, actually are, or could potentially be. Or to place the matter more succinctly it makes the ontological claim that; being is what it is not.

The recuperation of identity in the totality of command forces a re-territorialisation of subjectivity into a becoming different and a constitution. The process of separation can no longer be seen as either a division or as alienation – a return to species being would only be a fictitious harmony, and an illusionary unity. Here the Utopian impulse, the proper impulse to thinking of how things might be, gets read as the ground and the cause of the process of its diremption. By taking a de-centred subjectivity as the starting point to thinking through the totality, it grounds the totality in its dividedness, as an actuality where separation has been already effected. This challenges the nostalgic impulse in humanism and present in the early Marx to the reclamation of something denied that in fact was never possessed. It does not seem to be possible from a materialist point of view to uphold the claims of alienation alongside historical change. The notion would require that despite separation some inner element had continued to remain the same, unaffected by its division and ready to spring back into its proper space. No longer can separation be understood as a loss. Separated being is no longer the result, but the established precondition of social being. 

The criticisms of the 1960s like Debord’s and Marcuse clearly recognised that the discourse of alienation needed to be revisited. However they did so by totalising the issue to the point where alienation became the condition of our being. Moreover in Marcuse, the force of alienation becomes that we identity with the force of alienation.

“…the concept of alienation seems to become questionable when the individuals identify themselves with the existence that is imposed upon them and have it in their own development and satisfaction. This identification is not illusion but reality.”[536]

Arguably what is questionable in this explanation is that it is a reduced to a question of identification rather than a practice of reproduction. This is certainly present in the views of Laclau and Mouffe with whom swords have already been crossed. This theory takes representations as the substance. This produces some peculiar results. What these authors have done in place of an actual interrogation of politics of emancipation is to take one representative form of that relationship – class as privileged agent of emancipation – and deconstruct that representation as a stand in for the actual material relationships of power in society. From claiming that no single group can maintain that it occupies a central place within social life, the analysis jumps to the claim that antagonism is the fundamental constitutive feature of social and political life and that it will never be fully reconciled. In this context, the only possible view of the political is as a structure of limitation and regulation, modelled as it is on the maintenance of the need – in disingenuous democratic guise - for the representation of social conflict at the level of the political. It is an act of containment that does privilege one actor and re-legitimizes it – the actor of the sovereign ‘democratic’ state. Although there are superficial similarities between Laclau and Mouffe’s opinion that;

“The democratic society cannot be conceived any more as a society that would have realized the dream of a perfect harmony or transparency. Its democratic character can only be given by the fact that no limited social actor can attribute to herself the representation of the totality and claim in that way to have the 'mastery’ of the foundation”[537]

with the broad tradition of aleatory materialism outlined here, the critical difference lies in that this neutralises activity that is anti-state and anti-capitalist from anything but a formal role in political representation. In truth, as Mouffe’s sympathies for the theory of Carl Schmitt demonstrates, this is a political theory of legitimation of the techniques and outlook of power-over rather than power too. By making antagonism ontological it reduces the possibility of a politics of combination against agonism. Indeed, far from questioning the role of the state in upholding capitalist principles of accumulation, Mouffe seeks to give it a natural justification. In fact it could be said that by claiming that there “can never be total emancipation but only partial ones” she is in fact making an argument for forgetting altogether the connection between conflict and capitalist social relations.

The afterbirth of Schmitt

Schmitt’s political theory was founded on the idea of exception (Ausnahmezustand) from where he launched an attack on liberalism. According to Schmitt unforeseen and sudden situations in the political render unstable any system built on pre-planned responses and fixed legal codes. The political rests on a fundamental contingency and basic conflict hence it cannot adopt a priori rules of procedure. Liberalism disregards this inherent contingency and does not account for exception in its construal of rules.

The direction all this leads, and the reason why Schmitt has been taken so seriously by political theory, is to the theorisation of the crisis and state of emergency as not exceptional moments in political life opposed to some stable normalcy, but themselves the predominant form of the life of modern nations. Thus emergency powers and so on have increasingly become the normal operation of the state. In respect to Sovereignty, it is “precisely the exception that makes relevant the subject of sovereignty, that is, the whole question of sovereignty”. In fact it is exception, tied to war, tied to the political that is the fundamental category of Schmitt’s work, yet it is never defined as such, as it always has the character of being beyond the law, it is thus referred to as danger, or ‘extreme peril’ in fact, perhaps anything that confronts, undermines and destroys the rule. But it differs slightly from emergency which provokes the necessity of immediate responses to unforeseen events, because ‘emergency’ still relates to an idea of normalcy (and to state attempts to return to the normal) that is essentially what the later work of Schmitt seeks to undermine.

The classical treatment of states of emergency and of exception recognise the power of the sovereign or supreme leader to suspend certain aspects of the legal order. However the sovereign has no power to reverse or fundamentally change that order, and emergencies have a duration after which normality is returned to.[538] This follows the model of the Roman dictator as read by Machiavelli and Rousseau, as well as being found in the work of Locke wherein the ‘prerogative power’ can act against the law at the discretion of the public good. In the work Political Theology, Schmitt questions and dramatically revises this earlier paradigm, which he accepted for instance in The Dictatorship: the exception becomes the rule and the normalcy becomes an empty and meaningless point of reference. This destruction of normality retains one principle element, that is the authority of the sovereign power (though this Schmitt tries to give a transcendental/ theological authority). Schmitt seeks to legitimate the increase of the sovereign power, to not only temporally suspend the constitution for the public good, but to actively revise or fundamentally change the rules of constitutional authority – the sovereign both defines what is the exception and defines what is the adequate response to it. In this case, law which was itself the normal basis of sovereign authority, is also subverted by the total power of the absolutist state. In these circumstances what served initially as the foundation of sovereign power must be modified and cannot be returned to. The basis of sovereignty has become the power to determine the exception. The crisis of sovereign authority is offset by making authority sovereign.

Chantal Mouffe takes the worst elements from Schmitt, she shares his fear for the crisis of sovereign authority and she deepens his explanation of it, by generalising the most pessimistic of Hobbesian nightmares to the description of the social itself. The displacement of the aesthetic identities sought in the struggle of class did not weather well on Mouffe’s theory as far as the attack on all essentialisms quickly began to exhibit the scars of a more profound essentialism, such as friend and enemy, which do little to escape the simple relation of identity and non-identity through negation.

Schmitt’s idea of permanent exception ought to be used against his results, i.e. against the idea of a separated sovereign authority and against the continual attempt to recuperate its separation. However, rather than challenging the separation of the political, Chantal Mouffe seeks to resurrect it in the shape of a public display of ones identity wherein, just as in the regime of capitalism, a social Darwinism can work itself out in a display of democratic participation whereby so long as it can find a means of representing itself, every practice efficacious to the re-establishment of lost sovereign authority is given voice.

This can be put clearer into focus by Mouffe’s comments on the 'challenge' Schmitt poses to liberal democracy. By stating that Schmitt is an adversary who must be dealt with, Mouffe places herself fully in the liberal camp;

"the strategy is definitely not to read Schmitt to attack liberal democracy, but to ask how it could be improved. To think both with and against Schmitt- this is the thrust of our common endeavour."[539]

Mouffe's apologetics, her thinking 'with’ Schmitt, is a whole-scale appropriation of the characteristic conflict ridden and atomistic ontology of politics along with the insistence on the enduring specificity of the political and its status as constituted democratic power through representation. Her thinking against Schmitt lies in the belief that liberal democracy can overcome its drive to the state of exception and that the organised body of the people need not find its ultimate resolution in the total state. Specifically, this theoretical move posits 'agonism' over 'antagonism'. Agonism represents the plural constituted consensus driven by conflict over goals but shared belief in the efficacy of the system....'conflictual pluralism.' So what Mouffe would like to make us believe is that her interest in Schmitt is to 'rethink liberal democracy with a view to strengthening its institutions', which we will grant her in adversity, the more insidious and astonishing element of her rapprochement with one of the most prominent supporters of Nazi Germany, is her appropriation of its view of human nature and the political as inherently and essentially areas of conflict. For all her critiques of essentialism, this is little more than the classic liberal justification for the state, the same ontology that provokes the fascist demands for the total state. Rather than escape this formulation of the political, Mouffe assiduously affirms it. No critic of Schmitt, she is continuously arriving at his house through the back door.

The tradition based upon political consent from Locke up to Rawls represents the liberal belief that atomistic individuals consent to a democratic authority that can assure, negatively, that one individual’s desire cannot limit another’s. It is instructive that Rawls too develops his theory on the basis of an assumption of inequality and merely tries to develop a neo-Kantian form of contract based upon what its adherents ought to do. Classical social contract theory created the myth of legitimacy through a fiction of the transferral of right. Today however as the effects of the state are already present in both system and life world a force, there is no need to make the pretence of an abstract agreement, in fact in the concept of the multitude there is the formulation of a political subjectivity that reverses this scheme of false representation of the legitimacy of the state. The multitude is the figure of those that choose to deny potestas and to refrain from deferring their consent. Whereas the tendency in Hardt and Negri is to see the multitude only in its political demand for democracy and not so much in respect to how it subverts it, there is what will be argued in the conclusion a dark side of the multitude that potentially refuses any cooption.

From Class to Multitude and the end of representation

The space of the multitude is that opened up by the breakdown of traditional forms of political solidarity, predominantly those constructed upon class lines. In the eyes of those developing this concept, it reflects however a return in a sense to the ground on which class politics was initially constituted – that is to say the material, constitutive power of people – both in the (re) production of life itself and in the reactive form of political authority.[540] These themes should now be familiar in the broader project of aleatory materialism. The ‘ontological’ element of the multitude that Hardt talks of as the basis of society breaks with the Schmitt- Mouffe axis of the friend/ enemy distinction. In the right hands such an analysis could demonstrate that the friend/enemy dualism are reducible to the same horrific identity of political authority. They are conceptualisations that arise out of the mentality of trying to prevent the crisis of the legitimacy of the sovereign totality.

It is crucial to show that the multitude is a refusing-constituting being that, as an ‘ensemble of acting minorities,’ might appear as similar to Mouffe’s radical democratic subjects, is in fact conceived of, at least by its modern theorists, as subjectivities that do not demand the totality in terms of holding political authority over the whole of society, but rather seek to act as part of it. For this reason, as much as it is used to describe a new form of political agency, the multitude is in fact most fruitful as a sociology of the political, because its orientation is towards seeing how people act in relation to the social system itself.

Resnick and Wolfe try to qualify or supposedly extend the analysis in Empire with their conceptions of Marx’s class analysis based around the categories of productive and unproductive worker. Their summary of Marx’s position is as follows: ‘productive workers were those who actually produced the surplus while the unproductive workers provided the conditions of existence for the appropriation of the surplus.”[541] They go on to say the productive worker ‘gets a wage for producing the surplus’ whereas the unproductive worker is paid by the redistribution of the capitalist’s surplus. In stipulating this as the qualification they do not extend Negri’s analysis: they effectively set it back by almost thirty years. Moreover, the theoretical work where Negri directly deals on this issue has not been consulted. Resnick and Wolfe in fact provide the clue to their own error, in determining the unproductive worker as providing the ‘conditions of existence’ for the appropriation of surplus value. Seeing as they so much want to see this relation in class terms, what could it possibly mean other than that the unproductive worker is some kind of conspirator in the extraction of surplus value? In Resnick and Wolfe’s analysis the priority of the social is seen, after all unproductive work provides the very ‘conditions of existence’ of capitalism, but it is not analysed its consequences are not seen. It is bewildering that given this priority, and presumably the whole set of social connections it implies, that ‘class differences’ should be worked out around the access of those that produce surplus and those that do not. This is especially the case because of the impersonal nature of the general equivalent of money, theorised as the source of the social bond in Simmel and Marx.

The rise of social feminism would not have been possible without the political demise of the manual working class. What Resnick and Wolfe do is rigidify Marx’s class analysis to a particular element dominant at the historical juncture in which Marx wrote. The difficulty with this position is it fails to see the generalisation of the conditions for the perpetuation of capital as a system in forms of social command. Because so much is seen to be at stake politically in losing the centrality of the productive worker, that is the physical manufacture of goods that are sold, they will hold on to that centrality at the cost of the explication of capitalism.

Class composition is a fundamentally different orientation. Because it is a compound of the aggregate forms of class subjectivity, class composition gives far more versatility to the historical interpretation of social development. And yet for class analysis in Resnick and Wolfe’s conception to be of the use that they purport, then it would have to be able to adequately explain the rise of the political subjectivity in the movement of women in class terms. Ironically, the presence of the figure of feminism, what has been called the crisis of masculinity and the various forms of feminisation – to sum up the figure of the social worker and affective labour – elucidate class composition far more clearly than class analysis in Resnick and Wolfe’s terms elucidate it. The politicisation of domestic labour signifies an opening up of the terrain of conflict that had been largely excluded from the overall arena of political contestation even in its most anti-systemic guises. It shows that the marginalisation of women as political subjects was necessary to a fundamental separation, a separation so profound that it influenced a theoretical movement that posited a social relation – patriarchy - if not always superior to capital, most certainly equal to it and as it is very often claimed of far more of a historical permanence. The fallacy that the dimensions of the reproduction of capital that lie outside of contractual relations with an employer lie outside of society, is to develop a one-sided notion of capital. It treats capital only at the formal level, in the idealisation of wage- worker and allows exclusion, so much to the benefit of capital, to occur.

This is not to credit patriarchy as a political concept adequate to the totality. What the discussion of feminist essentialism and its breakdown does is reiterate the dimensions of social processes that posit a form of totality in their political consciousness, which corresponds to a political practice of raising awareness and subjective solidarity in response to a form of total domination.

In respect to the question of value the political project of Negri and the Autonomists arrive at a form of 'orthodox Marxism' that orthodox Marxism through its conventions would never reach. That is it derives the revolutionary configuration of subjectivity from the social form of value and the mode of production. It reflects the tensions within the capitalist form by recognizing the subjective forces that capitalism at once invokes and tries to limit. Crucially then "constituent power" is not constructed in contradistinction to economic life.[542] A theory of alienation is not required because there is no ontological separation: we are what we do. The peculiar form of current capitalist demands for producing a marketable product makes creative subjectivity a requisite for valorisation. Capital is forced to enjoin with the total social faculties of labourers - albeit a possibly depraved or limited form - in order to realise value. Demand as social need, as bio-political need and desire means that capital needs to enact society - and thus is subservient to it - in order to produce. Hence under Empire, where a general form of social command is necessary for capital to produce, labour is crucially constituted prior to capital. Moreover civil society (as the system of needs within Bourgeois economy) is absorbed into the state.[543]

In aleatory materialism we witness the re-composition of materialist totality. This occurs in the transition from class, party and state to the multitude, the general intellect and social cooperation. This is not thought about the totality as such, as method alone, but an immersion into the real social totality that maintains an insistence on the analysis of class composition and the corresponding form and nature of power. There can be no articulation of the structure of totality – nor of figures in political epistemology set in opposition to it– outside of the actual composition of social reality to which it relates. All theory must affirm what it takes as its ground and open that up transparently to criticism from the point of view of politics. In the 70’s when much of the left went on the retreat, Negri did not ‘liquidate’[544] the proletariat but looked for its re-composition. In the prevailing ideology of contemporary social forces the discourse on desire that has been monopolised by neo-liberalism has rendered these new configurations of social subjectivity as irrepresentable – they exist now in unstable, un-fixed and non-mediated forms: as for totality, these social forces can not yet find any kind of universality in the symbolic order.

This is also to do with the sociological content of the multitude. Though not using this term, Andre Gorz charts a similar process of the becoming marginal of the aristocratic skilled and unionised worker. Once seen as the material basis of the possibility of socialism, the breakdown of factory discipline and the sense of class identity that was achieved through work, dissolves the centrality of the proletariat to political struggle. In its place emerges the ‘non-class of the post-industrial proletariat’ whose figure is the marginalised worker, who goes from job to job, in between trades, working flexibly and not tied to any geographical location.[545] Following a similar vein to Bauman, Gorz undermines the universalism of the working class movement, arguing that there is a total inversion of the Marxist concept of the proletariat, in so much as its contemporary form it has become a ‘privileged minority’ and ‘a particularised individuality in revolt against the universal force of the apparatus.’[546] In contradistinction to the old working class bond, Gorz describes a new non-class who are immediately conscious of themselves. Their ‘existence is at once indissolubly subjective and objective, collective and individual’. This extends to every layer of society, and comprises all those who have been displaced by post-industrial economic development.[547]

The multitude and subjectivity

It has been discussed how the post-modern paradigm posits total subsumption and how social cooperation has been seen by Negri and others to be an intrinsic element of this process. If we are to retain difference, how do we account for the coexistence of otherness and reciprocity? The cooperation can be personal or impersonal but its conditions lie in a social capacity to act that exists generally.

The idea of the multitude crops up in a lot of C17th political philosophy notably in the work of Spinoza and Hobbes but it has been present in political thought at least since Aristotle’s Politics, if not before. Often the term is synonymous with the idea of the mass or simply the many. This is reflected in the contemporary usage of the word ‘multitude’, at least in the English speaking world, as an expression of a large quantity of different entities. In the last few years however, the term has had a particular renaissance in certain areas of political thought, as a more loaded category, destined to express not only quantitative mass but also a distinctly qualitative entity, something of substance. As a distinct political concept it captures a historical development and represents a movement away from previous configurations. The multitude as a political concept aims to capture a form of subjectivity based on dissent, on certain types of refusal, on its disobedience and other forms of action, movement and production that are neither constituted power nor necessarily a direct negation of that power. The multitude relates to the political as its constitutive force i.e. it is the substance of power and it is to what established power relates.[548] For aleatory materialism the multitude is the current bearer of constituent power.

“The multitude, rather than constituting a ‘natural’ ante-fact, presents itself as a historical result, a mature arrival point of the transformations that have taken place within the productive process and the forms of life. The ‘Many’ are erupting onto the scene, and they stand there as absolute protagonists while the crisis of the society of Work is being played out. Post-Fordist social cooperation, in eliminating the frontier between production time and personal time, not to mention the distinction between professional qualities and political aptitudes, creates new species, which makes the old dichotomies of ‘public/private’ and ‘collective individual’ sound farcical. Neither ‘producers’ nor ‘citizens’, the modern virtuosi attain at last the rank of Multitude.”[549]

For this reason the term registers a fluid, multi-dimensional reality of society from the point of view of agency. Yet this is not just a new concept of an agency, some new concoction of social theorists but a different conception of politics that integrates into a form of political sociology all of the diverse points of alignment, association and disassociation that characterise social agency. From Nationalist identification to disassociation and devolution; the movement of refugees, exiles, migrants, the process of cultural miscegenation and the increase in cultural subsystems, the political resistances to states and corporations and the underground movements and networks that sustain them. It is a concept that has the potential to encompass that which fell out of the traditional centres of sovereign power. In the words of Paolo Virno;

“The Multitude obstructs and dismantles the mechanisms of political representation. It expresses itself as an ensemble of ‘acting minorities’, none of which, however, aspires to transform itself into a majority. It develops a power that refuses to becomes government.”[550]

The need for and the appearance of the concept suggest the emergence of a new consciousness of social subjectivity, within social subjectivity. That is to say it marks some index of activity within society that marks its own consciousness of itself. At the moment however the sense of the need to represent the plenitude of different activities, that is Virno’s ‘acting minorities’ conflicts with the implicit imposing of outer limit on the possible forms of its expression – this is ultimately the self-identity of the multitude. That is in so far as the multitude is always giving itself expression, generating and creating itself in different configurations and forms acting as constitutive power it is constantly evading definite capture as a quality other than this process itself. Hence this concept reflects the reality of an open expressive totality, but is invented too to work towards it, to work towards communication between its elements in the form of de- centralised networks. The tension is this inscribing of political unity into the reality, gained from the potential of the concept rather than the actuality of what occurs on the ground. The multitude should resist any given, a priori conception of what constitutes or limits its subjectivity. The great benefit of the idea is that it precludes a reductionist inscription of necessary political unity into the ontology of the category.

One of the difficulties with some contemporary uses of this concept is its use as a substitute for a self- identical form of subjectivity. Here it simply replaces the class concept, it has a different inner content, but its form and function remain that of attributing to subjectivity an idealised self-identical character. But can the multitude be thought of in terms of a series? Defined in Sartrean terms this would be,  “an ensemble each of whose members is determined in alterity by the others [in contrast to reciprocity].”[551]

The Multitude as a class concept

The concept of the multitude marks a important development away from class politics, but it also marks a return to class of sorts, a return to the context of politics that sociology set itself up to deconstruct. It registers a socio-political configuration that is immeasurable and un-representable in classical sociological terms. It is primarily a political concept, but one that requires a different orientation to the social, that insists upon looking at the social from the point of view of power.[552]

Class analysis provided a general framework that had both a subjective and perspectival element that was closely linked to an objective social reality. The multitude is in nascent form such a framework of subject- based analysis. Its great benefit is that it continues to locate the dynamic creative element of society within the activity of people themselves. The Italian Operaismo tradition’s appropriation of the discourse of the post-modern to reassert this creativity is a powerful rebuttal to the elitist assertions of post-modernity as avant-garde high theory. In fact the post-modern, for all the derision it has received, has increasingly been adopted as a self- definition by those who see their work as marginal but part of a wider set of creative and constitutive activities. As opposed to the tendency in theory to reduce new subjectivities to politics of identity, as if it were just a matter of values, the concept of the multitude registers different subjectivities, different forms of constitutive behaviour, not reducible to a level of appearance – i.e. not effective in the realm of values alone. Hence Negri describes the fate and completion of modernity in terms of the return to subjectivity and this is one of the bolder moves within aleatory materialism.[553]

Hardt talks of two dimensions to the concept of multitude.[554] The first is permanent historical presence as an element essential to the formation of society, which is humanity’s refusal of authority. This Hardt makes clear is a fundamental ontological claim that informs his and Negri’s perspective. The second dimension of the multitude, must be, Hardt claims, addressed in the singular as the multitude rather than multitudes, ostensibly because it, in its historical potential to create the new society (and its actuality as all those that are under the domination of capital) must be capable of taking a decision. Hardt’s conception differs from Virno who claims that.

“The multitude… shuns political unity, is recalcitrant to obedience, never achieves the status of juridical personage, and is thus unable to make promises, to make pacts, or to acquire and transfer rights.”[555]

However even Paolo Virno tends in his recent A Grammar of the Multitude to recast the multitude in terms of a unitary, though plural, philosophical conception of a One.[556] This analysis of the multitude is problematic for it undermines and betrays the strength of the analytical diagnosis that the concept of multitude brings to bear on the question of totality and subjectivity. For what Hardt seeks to bring out of it, no doubt for all of his worthy attempts to the contrary (note for instance is appeal for forms of subjectivity outside of the parameters of the singular and the universal), is a utopian reconciliation where under the gaze of the network model, the un- organisable and the un-represented become organisation and representation.

Given the un- representability of the multitude, it cannot be the basis of juridical forms. It is the mass counterpoised to the state, or even opposed to the ‘people’, those that enjoy and uphold the sovereign ambition of the state. In so far as the political is treated as the legal and representable, the multitude is anti-political. However what must be understood is that this is not a figure of total anti-state politics. The multitude is anti-state but only in a partial and inconsistent way; what it denies in one set of circumstances it can reaffirm in other respects. Indeed state power might be a subject of indifference when it does not impinge on the vital energy or acting singularities, it is certainly not a stance that we can claim is generalisable to all aspects of social life but only those that come into direct confrontation with the subject’s desires. However, saying this, it could equally be argued that when the multitude moves to affirm an aspect of the exercise of state power that it becomes, albeit temporarily, a people.

The concept works if we buy into the particular conception of sovereignty at work here. This constituent power is not one that knocks against structures; rather the latter are only effects of its activity.  In so far as it acts, what makes its action multitudinous is that it acts against transcendental forms and conceptions of power.  Whereas in Schmitt the “omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver,” [557] in the theorisation of post-modern aleatory materialism, the multitude always unsettles representations that are based upon consent and complicity with the sovereign order. As soon as elements within the multitude act to form a people, i.e. to build upon the constituent power of the multitude to reinvent or re-authenticate the sovereign principle, they turn against it and open themselves up to a desertion in the ranks so that only the front line remains: a thin line of representation that can be sliced through and crushed.

Title, Intro and contents

Chapter 1: Simple and complex totalities of interiority

Chapter 2: Complexity through the immanent deconstruction of simple totality

Chapter 3: Differentiation, complexity and the exhaustion of totality

Chapter 5: Conclusion: The limits of totality

Bibliography