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    From the Proletariat to the Multitude: Multitude and Political Subjectivity

    Jason Read
    Colby College
    jread@colby.edu

    © 2005 Jason Read.
    All rights reserved.

    Review of:
    Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin, 2004.

  1. Where Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's first book, Empire, defined an object of critique--the book's title is also their name for the global order they seek to analyze--their follow-up, Multitude, attempts the more difficult project of identifying and describing the revolutionary subject. The difference between the two books is not rigid: the "multitude" makes its appearance in Empire, and Multitude continues to examine "Empire" and the new global powers in the age of "the war on terror." Even so, while the first book addresses the hot topics of globalization and neo-liberalism and thus fits easily into ongoing conversations and debates, the second addresses a problem that is rarely posed: the problem of revolutionary subjectivity, of the powers and possibilities capable of changing the existing global order. This problem does not lend itself to the same debates and discussions. This difference could perhaps be used to explain the ways in which the two books have been received: while the first was a crossover hit, making it into the pages of The New York Times and Time, the second has not had nearly the same success. The handful of major publications that have addressed Multitude have dismissed it as a kind of sophomore slump. The New York Times even went so far as to enlist Frances Fukuyama, perhaps the individual most predisposed to disagree with Multitude, to declare that Hardt and Negri's fifteen minutes of fame are officially over.

  2. Multitude is organized as a response to two questions: what remains of Empire (the concept) in the wake of the United States' unilateral war against terror and in Iraq? And what subjective forces, desires, and identities are capable of combating Empire (the political formation)? The first of these questions is somewhat extrinsic to the organization of the text, reflecting transformations in the world that have taken place since the publication of the first volume; the second, however, is intrinsic to the text's organization. The problem of revolutionary subjectivity is first announced in Empire as a kind of lacunae, as that which is difficult or even impossible to name or imagine in the present. While Marx could see continuity and even teleology underlying the revolutions of the nineteenth century, the various protests of the twentieth century--Tiananmen, Los Angeles, Chiapas, Seoul--appear to be discontinuous, without an identifiable subject or struggle to help us connect the dots (Empire 54). Marx compared the sporadic revolutions that marked the nineteenth century to the burrowing of a mole, whose discontinuous emergence from the dark earth is evidence of a hidden continuity and a concealed identity, the continuity of class struggle and the common identity of the proletariat. What is lacking in the present is any sense of that common substance or common vocabulary to connect the various struggles; they are left to stand out in their singularity, contingency, and heterogeneity.

  3. Hardt and Negri's assertion that struggles have become incommunicable, that they cannot be seen as discrete expressions of a common process, subject, or identity, traverses a decades-old debate about the relationship between economic conditions and political struggles. What unifies different political struggles separated by place and time, for Marx, is the recognition of a common economic enemy, capitalism, and a common economic language, that of exploitation. The heterogeneity of political protests was counteracted and supported by the universality of economic conditions. The notion that the economy is a universal and necessary condition underlying and supporting the apparent contingency of political desires and subjectivities has come under assault from multiple directions in past decades, in the work of Hannah Arendt, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and Jacques Rancière, among others. Common to these diverse views is the idea that Marx's strategy of finding the common economic essence underlying the various appearances of politics amounts to a negation of the political in all its contingency, heterogeneity, and specificity. Politics, roughly to characterize these diverse views, is not the expression of some underlying economic essence or identity, but the staging, articulation, or constitution of identities. For Rancière, the most recent advocate of a reconsideration of the political, the salient relation is not between the economy and politics, but between the "police," which divides society into its corresponding classes and groups, and "politics," which challenges these divisions by giving voice to a group that does not fit within the existing classifications (Disagreement 30). To deny the difference between economic conditions and political constructions is to deny the very existence of the political, which is founded on the rigorously egalitarian fact of speech. Equality is not a goal to be realized through politics, but an ungraspable presupposition of politics, a presupposition that manifests itself whenever the "people"--"as the part of those that have no part"--speak ("Peuple ou Multitudes?" 95). Much of Rancière's work can be understood as an exploration of the link that Aristotle posited between mankind as a "speaking" and "political" animal (Disagreement 1). Thus, for Rancière, the break between economic conditions and political identities is not a problem to be rectified, but a condition for the liberation of political philosophy, for the return of politics to thought and thought to politics. As Rancière argues, politics will no longer be subordinated to sociological "meta-politics," which assigns a place to all subjects and more or less "polices" these identities, interpreting all speech according to the grid of class locations (vii). Thus politics is restored to its dignity when it becomes a site for the constitution of political subjectivity and not simply the site for the articulation of demands that are already constituted within the factories and workshops of the economy.

  4. Hardt and Negri's writing traverses the same ground, the apparent separation of the economic from the political, but it does not come to the same conclusions. What Hardt and Negri share with such philosophers as Rancière is the question of how to conceive of or even imagine a political subject adequate to the task of acting in and transforming the current global situation. As Hardt and Negri's analysis suggests, this problem comes to light in the wake of the "proletariat" which can no longer be assumed to be tunneling underground, waiting for the right conditions to emerge in all of its revolutionary splendor. However, while for some of these other thinkers the loss of the "proletariat" as a figure which traverses the gap between the particularity of social conditions and the universality of political goals signals a complete break in the project of linking social conditions to the constitution of political subjectivities, for Hardt and Negri it is an opportunity to reconsider this connection in light of the transformations of social conditions, of labor, and of production. The "multitude" emerges for Hardt and Negri as a new figure of political subjectivity defined not in opposition to economic conditions but through them: "Multitude," write Hardt and Negri, "is a class concept" (103).

  5. If it is correct to say that the concept of the multitude is rooted in an economic analysis, it is even more accurate to say that it is rooted in an understanding of a fundamental transformation of the economy. As a political concept, the multitude depends on the other central concept of Hardt and Negri's analysis, "immaterial labor." As Hardt and Negri make clear, it was this connection, as it was initially developed in Empire, that opened the door to much criticism, specifically that their analysis pointed to a new elite: the text-messaging "bloggers," hackers, and service workers who will lead the next revolution. For some critics of Empire, the concept of "immaterial labor" is situated at the impossible meeting point where nineteenth-century Marxist analysis of a vanguard class of workers intersects with the twentieth-century idea of a new information economy: an unholy alliance of V. I. Lenin and Robert Reich. What these critics, such as Timothy Brennan, saw in the idea of "immaterial labor" is the combination of a failed political strategy, locating a privileged class or sector of the economy that controlled the levers of production, and misguided empirical analysis, the idea of a radically new economy based on information that changed all of the rules (103). Multitude responds to this criticism by reframing the concept. "Immaterial labor" as a concept developed through the empirical, philosophical, and sociological studies of Maurizio Lazzarato, Paolo Virno, and Antonio Negri refers to the hegemony of intellectual or affective elements, information, communication, and desire in the production and circulation of commodities. Hardt and Negri clarify in Multitude that this "hegemony" is analogous to and even derived from Marx's argument in Capital regarding the hegemony of industrial production, in which a small sector of the economy determines the form and the rate of production. Compared to agricultural or industrial production, immaterial labor remains a small sector of the economy in quantitative terms; at the same time, however, it intersects with all sectors of production. Commodities produced in pre-industrial technological conditions such as sweatshops are researched, developed, and marketed according to the techniques, habits, and images of affective and immaterial labor; similarly, the agricultural meets the immaterial as the genetic material from seeds is developed, copyrighted, etc. Immaterial labor is thus hegemonic in qualitative rather than quantitative terms (109). For Hardt and Negri the essential point is not simply that there are hegemonic relations between the different sectors of the economy--they are not, after all, looking for new areas of investment--but that the new transformation of labor entails a fundamental transformation of society and subjectivity.

  6. Forms of production become truly "hegemonic" when they constitute not only relations of control over other forms, but also general cultural sensibilities (115). The multitude as a political concept is perhaps best defined from the historical vantage point when immaterial labor constitutes a general transformation of society. While all forms of production create the world in their own image (in an age of industrial production the world is seen as a machine), what immaterial labor--or biopolitical production--produces are not only things but also the languages, habits, concepts, and desires of social existence. While material production creates the means of social life, the objects and spaces through which it is lived, immaterial production creates social life itself (149). This is what Hardt and Negri refer to as the "becoming common" of labor--labor produces the common, the shared content and context of life, while at the same time becoming common. A similar, but distinct point, regarding the connection of the multitude to the new forms of labor, is made by Paolo Virno, who argues that the generalization of habits, desires, and concepts destroys the "special places" of society, thought, and language, with their particular vocabularies, and replaces them with "common places" (36). For Virno this transformation entails both a breakdown of the division between public and private as a diffuse "non-public public sphere" replaces both and a transformation of the relation between the one and the many: in an age of exchanged and commodified culture, it becomes abundantly clear that the individual exists only as process of individuation within social processes.

  7. It is worth pointing out that the concept of the multitude traces its genealogy not only to a particular site of intellectual production, namely Italy, but also to a particular manner of producing and circulating concepts, in which the same concepts, "multitude," "immaterial labor," and "biopolitics," are produced and developed by multiple authors without clear lines of ownership and inheritance. A thorough consideration of the concept of "multitude" would encompass not only the work of Negri, Hardt, and Virno but also the work of many others, a legacy which stretches from Spinoza and the revival of Spinoza criticism to work on the economy, politics, and ontology. There is thus some overlap of form and content in the development of the concept of the multitude, as that concept is produced and debated through exactly the technologies and subjectivities of immaterial labor that that concept is meant to make clear. To speak anecdotally, those I have met who are most passionate about the idea, who log the most hours in the various listservs where these concepts are discussed, are not academics, but the very immaterial laborers Hardt and Negri work to describe.

  8. In the works of Virno, Hardt, and Negri, the multitude as a new form of political subjectivity is based in part on an anthropology of the new structures of society and labor. The multitude is founded on an idea of a "common" substance that is expressed in multiple instances and is produced, or at least partly brought about by the transformations of labor and society: "In philosophical terms we can say that these are so many singular modes of bringing to life a common laboring substance: each mode has a singular essence and yet they all participate in a common substance" (125).

  9. Hardt and Negri are not content to limit the concept of the multitude to the workplace, however diffuse or disseminated across society the workplace may be. The multitude, if it is not simply to reproduce the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist tradition of locating the vanguard in different sectors of the economy, must be imagined as immanent to virtually all of society; that is to say, if the multitude is, as Hardt and Negri argue, a "class concept," it is a concept that thoroughly reworks that which is understood by class. Hardt and Negri had already argued for an extended understanding of the concept of the proletariat in Empire:

    The fact that under the category of proletariat we understand all those exploited by and subject to capitalist domination should not indicate that the proletariat is a homogeneous or undifferentiated unit. It is indeed cut through in various directions by differences and stratifications. Some labor is waged, some is not; some labor is restricted to within the factory walls, some is dispersed across the unbounded social terrain; some labor is limited to eight hours a day and forty hours a week, some expands to fill the entire time of life; some labor is accorded a minimal value, some is exalted to the pinnacle of the capitalist economy. . . . Our point here is that all of these diverse forms of labor are in some way subject to capitalist discipline and capitalist relations of production. This fact of being within capital and sustaining capital is what defines the proletariat as a class. (Empire 53)

  10. It could be argued, however, that the concept of the proletariat has a built-in rigidity that makes it difficult for it to become a figure for a new subjectivity. In Multitude, Hardt and Negri develop the concept of the multitude through a discussion of two figures that have always been situated at the borders of any traditional concept of the proletariat: the peasantry and the poor. As Hardt and Negri remind us, Marx's denunciation of the peasantry as failed contender for revolutionary subjectivity was based upon the physical isolation and dispersion of the (specifically French) peasantry: "In Marx's view, political subjectivity requires of a class not only self-representation but first and most fundamentally internal communication" (123). As this separation breaks down, the peasant becomes both part of the international production and dissemination of a commodified food supply and subject to the various conditions of "immaterial labor": the patenting of genetic codes, the modification of crops, etc. The peasant no longer stands outside the working class. A similar point could be made with respect to what is called "the industrial reserve army," "the unemployed," or "the poor." With workers of all sorts precariously poised on the brink of unemployment or underemployment, and with many of those excluded from work proper producing the cultural forms and languages essential to capital, the division between who is inside or outside of capital falls apart. Production has become "biopolitical," directly producing the conditions and fabric of existence itself, from the very nature of food to the habits and styles of existence. Thus, Hardt and Negri suggest it is perhaps no longer useful to argue in terms of identity and difference, or inside and outside; better to speak instead of singularity and communality: "We are a multiplicity of singular forms of life and at the same time share a common global existence. The anthropology of the multitude is an anthropology of singularity and commonality" (127).

  11. It is possible to chart some of the limitations of the concept on the terrain of its intellectual production. Many critics (especially in major periodicals that have recently moved Hardt and Negri from the "hot" to the "not" column) have seen this concept of the multitude as a utopian fantasy, out of touch with the real divisions of the world. While such claims of "utopianism" are as easy to make as they are empty, there is something to the charge that Hardt and Negri's idea of the multitude fails to describe the divisions of the present. Not the old divisions of working class, proletariat, poor, and household production--Hardt and Negri have made it clear that these divisions fail to capture both the commonality and singularity of contemporary production--but divisions within the anthropological condition of the multitude. Which is not to say that Hardt and Negri entirely neglect a consideration of the hierarchies, ideologies, and strategies that submerge the commonality and singularity of the multitude in a tide of conflicts and identities. As Hardt and Negri stress, the multitude is to some extent virtual; it is a series of material possibilities more than an empirically existing class. The question is not "What is the Multitude?" but "What can the Multitude become?" (105). Moreover, they demonstrate how empire constitutes new hierarchies, divisions, and exclusions, what Hardt and Negri call hierarchies of inclusion, which no longer divide between nations or zones but run above and beyond such boundaries; these are hierarchies that create internal "third worlds" within the major global metropolises (166). What Hardt and Negri do not consider, or do not consider enough, is how the very forms of labor and commonality that constitute the multitude, also constitute divisions within the multitude. The internal exclusion that Hardt and Negri write of means that all populations are included within the same market, which constitutes the basic conditions of existence, without at the same time being useful to it--that is, exploitable by it. Massive populations, whole continents, are deemed superfluous and are left to die. As Étienne Balibar has argued, "at the moment at which humankind becomes economically and, to some extent, culturally 'united,' it is violently divided 'biopolitically'" (130). What Hardt and Negri do not consider is thus the extent to which the very conditions that define the multitude, the formations of labor, communication, and social relations, may be themselves complicated by the socioeconomic divisions of the world. Moreover, these conditions, the "commons" of language and desire, may in turn deepen the divisions of the world, to the point where the divisions are anthropological as much as they are economic or cultural. The anthropological condition of the multitude continuously threatens to divide the world into a multitude and something like a sub-multitude whose simultaneous exclusion from the common languages, desires, and labors of immaterial labor and inclusion in the market as a condition of survival might constitute an exclusion from the very conditions of political subjectivity altogether. This paradoxical situation could be described as an inclusion in Empire but an exclusion from the multitude.

  12. These final remarks are not meant as a dismissal of the concept. The multitude as a concept is a powerful figure of analysis, imagination, and desire; however, it must become a condition for understanding not only the possibilities of the future, but also the dangers of the present.

    13. Philosophy Department
    Colby College
    jread@colby.edu

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    Works Cited

    Balibar, Étienne. "Violence, Ideality, and Cruelty." Politics and the Other Scene. Trans. James Swenson. New York: Verso, 2002. 129-146.

    Brennan, Timothy. "The Italian Ideology." Debating Empire. Ed. Gopal Balakrishnan. New York: Verso, 2003. 337-367.

    Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.

    Rancière, Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1999.

    ---. "Peuple ou multitudes? Question d'Éric Alliez à Jacques Rancière." Multitudes. 9 June 2002. 95-101.

    Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life., Trans. Isabella Bertoletti et al. New York: Semiotexte, 2004.

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