The Populist Moment, Chapter 11, Part 3
“Multitudes” Against the People
On the Theses of Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri

3,226 words

Introduction here, Chapter 11 Part 2 here, Chapter 11 Part 4 here

Translated by F. Roger Devlin

Intellectual labor, say Hardt and Negri, is intrinsically associated with sharing and common production. This “common,” consisting in information, knowledge, and emotional and affective relations is both the condition and the result of today’s predominant form of labor — but of course it has nothing to do with what is generally understood under this term. It does not found a community, for it has neither unity nor identity. The “common being,” for Hardt and Negri, is merely the activity productive of what is common. The Communism of singularities is thus rigorously opposed to the communitarianism of identity. Besides, the shared is “the incarnation, production, and liberation of the multitude” (E., 303). The stronger the hegemony of immaterial labor, the more the power of the “multitude” is supposed to grow.

Thus we arrive at the key concept of multitude, which Hardt and Negri make the new historical subject of our age. The “plural multitude of subjectivities productive and creative of globalization,” they affirm, constitutes the “other head of the imperial eagle.” It is supposedly the “living alternative growing within the Empire itself” (M., 7). So it must be examined in detail.

Negri defines multitude as the “desire to construct the common,” in which respect it is the ontological foundation of all society. But in reality, this concept of multitude is never defined clearly or analytically with reference to given sociopolitical categories. Hardt and Negri are content to say that it constitutes an “ensemble of singularities” forming an imminent collective body.[i] The important point is to see that it must not on any account be perceived as a “totality” in the fashion of a people, but as an “open multiplicity”; i.e., a mere collection of individuals endowed with the attributes of power. Here we come back to the liberal definition of collectivities. “The multitude,” write Hardt and Negri, “is a multiple subject, differentiated within, which is not constructed and does not act from any principle of identity or unity (and still less of indifference), but from what is common to it” (M., 126). Michael Hardt adds that “the multitude is multiplicity rendered powerful.”[ii] Thus it is a social body without organs; a community of interested behavior, desires, and needs; an ensemble of singularities preserving their differences, but able to think and act in common without the least mediation. This, moreover, is why the multitude, borrowing its form from immaterial labor, is today organizing itself in networks. This is clearly a definition that leaves one wondering — as Didier Muguet has noted, for whom “this term which recurs on almost every page of the book and which serves as the basis of its argument is in fact a sort of chameleon signifier, a rather inconsistent evocation: in fact, a real catch-all.”[iii] Still more radically, Daniel Bensaïd writes that the concept of multitude is at once “theoretically confused, sociologically inexact, philosophically obscure, and strategically empty.”[iv]

As we have just seen, rather than “subject” (a Cartesian concept), Negri systematically speaks of “singularity” (a Spinozan concept) to designate the individual. An important and significant reference: The term “multitude” (multitudo) is in fact taken from Spinoza, whom Negri considers the first philosopher to have given a materialist framework to human existence. More precisely, the author of the Ethics, read here in light of Deleuze and Guattari’s “materialistic ontology,” is perceived not merely as one of the first philosophers to have deconstructed the central concept subject, but also as one of the first to have opposed multitude (singularities) to the people and inscribed the democratic aspiration within the horizon of immanence; i.e., as a thinker of the power of a multitude of singularities acting in cooperation. This line of reasoning, let us note in passing, is part of a larger “back to Spinoza” movement affecting a number of authors such as Etienne Balibar, Giorgio Agamben, Pierre Macherey, Jacques Bidet, Frédéric Lordon, Alexandre Matheron, etc.[v] For Hardt and Negri, it is Spinoza’s “prophetic desire” which “must be reactivated so that the multitude can sabotage the parasitic power of the Empire and reappropriate the fruit of the cooperation of living labor — its productive force within the biopolitical mode of production.”[vi] But we must recall here that Spinoza is generally considered one of the great ancestors of liberalism precisely insofar as he was the first to proclaim the autonomy of the internal space in politics.[vii] The rereading of Spinoza by the two authors is therefore often forced. Negri, for example, passes over the fact in complete silence that for Spinoza the multitude must be led “as if by a single mind.” “Spinoza is indeed the thinker of the power constitutive of the multitude; is he really the thinker of its self-organization without mediation or representation?” asks Céline Spector.[viii]

Inasmuch as the Empire, understood ontologically, is supposed to produce subjectivities capable of resisting it, Hardt and Negri affirm that a new theory of subjectivity is necessary. “After a new theory of surplus value,” they write, “a new theory of subjectivity must be formulated which fundamentally functions via knowledge, communication, and language.” The goal is nothing less than to transform the multitude into a mass of intelligent productivity, which would create the conditions for absolute democracy! In fact, one may ask, along with David Sherman, whether this theory does not fall back into the logic of identity peculiar to the Enlightenment by limiting itself to invoking a perfectly empty subjectivity founded on an “artificial positivity” that characterizes one of the worst aspects of current “imperial” domination.[ix]

Hardt and Negri, it is true, also say that we must not so much ask ourselves what the multitude is as what it “can become” (M., 131). The multitude, in other words, is mainly of value as a tendency or process that reveals a socio-historical subject already at work in the present, and at the same time pregnant with the future. The multitude is supposed to be “the tendency by which the social subject which already exists seeks to affirm itself as the political subject which it still is not.”[x] Then, the question becomes: What renders this “social subject” especially apt to constitute itself as a political subject?

In fact, thanks to the concept of multitude, it is mainly a matter of warding off any temptation to hypostatize a historical subject in a unified manner, whether this subject is the people, class, revolution, or proletariat. The opposition between multitude and people is especially marked, which justified Céline Spector’s remark that “the concept of multitude, at first glance, appears as an obvious substitute for the concept of the people, discredited because of its structural connection with the genesis of modern sovereignty in the form of nation-state.”[xi] Besides, Negri explicitly defines the concept of multitude as opposed to that of people: “As opposed to the concept of people, the concept of multitude is that of a singular multiplicity, a concrete universal. The people constitutes a social body; the multitude does not, for the multitude is the flesh of life.”[xii]

Let us return to this issue. For most political theorists, the people is fundamentally distinct from the multitude in that it is endowed with particularities proper to it and which make it a sort of person at once moral and socio-historical, while the multitude is merely an anonymous multiplicity, an undifferentiated mass. In this context, the multitude receives a pejorative sense: It marks the limit beyond which or short of which politics sinks into formlessness or chaos. This is the sense Plato gives to okhlos, the “multitude,” and also which Cicero attributes to multitudino effrenata, the “unchained multitude.” In the best case, as in Hobbes, the multitude refers back to the pre-political state preceding the institution of the social contract. The multitude, says Hobbes, has no political being. It partakes of the state of nature or civil war, while the people is “something unified, having a will, and to which an action can be attributed.” This is why “we give the public person the name of people rather than that of multitude.”[xiii] Besides, in the history of political science, whether in Hobbes, Hegel, or Rousseau, the concept of people is produced from the transcendence of the sovereign. It is by positing itself as a transcendent power that the State was able to construct the people and identify itself with them, even as it imposed its sovereignty upon them. National identity thus associated itself with popular sovereignty, which produced it as the final representation of itself. The people is therefore a correlate of sovereignty.

Spinoza, on the other hand, presents an image of the multitude that directly breaks with all these classic political theories. While the latter put the stress on an external power’s necessary mediation on society in order to reconcile the contradictory aspirations of which it is the locus, Spinoza believes in the spontaneous development of collective forces which require no State mediation to harmonize with one another (we are not very far here from the liberal theory of the “invisible hand”). This is why Hardt and Negri appeal to him.

The leading trait of the “absolute democracy” the authors advocate is to reject any form of sovereignty, whether national, statist, or popular. “The multitude cannot be sovereign,” they say explicitly (M., 375). Even better, it “banishes” sovereignty “from politics” (M., 386). “If the multitude must form a body, this must remain an open, plural composition without ever becoming a unitary entity divided as a function of hierarchized organs” (M., 226). Making the transcendence of the one the condition of the social bond, political sovereignty inevitably engenders a form of domination.[xiv] Now, continue Hardt and Negri, from the moment individuals produce social relations autonomously, thus constituting themselves as a multitude, any form of unitary sovereignty becomes superfluous. The multitude is a multiple which cannot be reduced to the one: “The people is one; the multitude, by contrast, is multiple” (M., 8). Since any form of sovereignty implies transcendence, and therefore domination, Hardt and Negri mean to break with such transcendence by returning to the concepts of subjectivity, immanence, and multitude. Since multitude is just as immanent as “imperial” power, Negri deduces from it that its “ontological power can eliminate the relation of sovereignty today.” The relation between imperial biopower and the multitude does not, therefore, have a dialectical character.[xv] Instead, it configures a “sequence of events” produced by the creative activity of new forms of subjectivity.

All that remains is to dissociate the concept of power from that of sovereignty. This is what Hardt and Negri do by taking up the old dichotomy between potentia and potestas. The potentiality of being in Spinoza is constituted spontaneously as a movement of emancipation. In his Political Treatise, Spinoza emphasizes that the holders of potestas never have anything more than the potentia accorded them by the multitude. Negri takes from this the idea that the “expression of potentiality” can never signify “the institution of power.” It is in this sense that he speaks of the “power of the multitude” (potentia multitudinis): power involving no sovereignty, but which resides in the teeming and multiform creativity continually produced by the “common.”

Hardt and Negri are thus proposing a “new science of democracy” (M., 394) rid of everything that suggests politics, beginning with popular sovereignty. The sovereign in their eyes is necessarily an oppressor. The “destruction of sovereignty” is explicitly cited as a precondition for the “construction of democracy” (M., 399). This negation of politics is said to be all the more justified in that cooperative networks of production are supposed to engender a “new institutional structure” (M., 396). In the end, the alternative “sovereignty or democracy” is called upon to replace the alternative “sovereignty or anarchy.” This allows democracy to be redefined as something other than the popular sovereignty with which it has always been identified. After this Hardt and Negri once again emphasize that, in contrast to the people, the multitude tends towards a play of differences that is not the vehicle of any identity (M., 125). It is precisely in this that its intrinsic value lies: “The people’s identity is replaced by mobility, flexibility, and the permanent differentiation of universal multiplicity” (E., 416). Then it becomes possible to “dissolve the concept of people at the same time as that of nation.” We come to understand that recourse to the “multitude” is in fact a means for denying the autonomy of politics and getting the people (and peoples) out of the way.

“The concepts people, proletariat, and social classes are henceforward obsolete,” affirms Antonio Negri.[xvi] But this does not prevent him from saying that the multitude is a “class concept” (M., 129) and that it is simply a new name for the proletariat, or even that it incarnates the “new subjective figure of the proletariat.” Obviously, this is only possible by completely redefining what is to be understood by “social class” and “proletariat.” As is well-known, it has been a long time since Marxist theoreticians themselves have identified the proletariat exclusively with the working class. Hardt and Negri are thus breaking down an open door when they write: “We understand the proletariat as a vast category including all those whose labor is directly or indirectly exploited by the capitalist norms of production and reproduction to which it is subject” (E., 27). The problem is that by claiming “all forms of labor tend to proletarianize themselves” (E., 315), they end by including everybody and anybody in the proletariat. Whereas social class is obviously an exclusive concept, the multitude is an inclusive concept, meaning that nearly everybody can be put into it: “If we posit the multitude as a class concept, the concept of exploitation will be defined as the exploitation of cooperation: cooperation not between individuals, but between singularities, exploitation of the totality of singularities, and of the networks which compose the totality, and of the totality that includes the networks.”[xvii] Being composed “of all the different figures of social production” (M., 9) and of “the totality of those who work under the guardianship of capital,” the “cooperating multitude” can then be posited as a “universal class force.” Since the distinction between productive labor, reproductive labor, and unproductive labor has become elusive, everyone (or very nearly) can be considered as a “proletarian.” Unlike class, multitude does not presuppose any primacy of salaried over unsalaried labor, nor even of labor over non-labor. “What determines the belonging of the multitude,” observes Pierre Dardot, “is, in the end, participation in production understood as the production of scientific and practical knowledge [de savoirs, de connaissances] and information.”[xviii] Negri himself goes so far as to speak of a “new cognitive proletariat.” This “cognitariat” will replace the proletariat, unless they are Internet users . . . or consumers.[xix]

Hardt and Negri in fact have all the less difficulty affirming the classic social classes’ disappearance in that they have posited from the beginning the vanishing of the law of value in “cognitive capitalism.” This is what allows them to reject both the people and the proletariat in the traditional sense of the term. The spontaneous movement of the desiring masses, the defense of the constitutive power of the free play of subjectivities, the “power to act upon bodies,” and the cooperation of “swarms of intelligence” replace the class struggle. It is no longer a class point of view, but the “multitude’s” point of view which must be adopted to judge politics and the State.

So what remains of Marxist theory in their work? Not a lot, as we have already seen with regard to the question of value. Marx is in fact systematically revised in light of Spinoza and Deleuze. When they write, for example, that “real revolutionary praxis refers to the level of production” (E., 201), Hardt and Negri immediately redefine “production” not as economic production, but also as “production of the desiring machine” or “production of subjectivity,” since classic industrial production today is tending to give way to the computing model of the rhizome or the network. The opposition between dominant and possessing classes and dominated classes is also totally transformed. Not only is there no more working class, but power can no longer be defined in terms of economic relations of production. Finally, the old dialectic no longer lets us grasp the reality of social relations, nor the deployment of material processes of production, since “imperial sovereignty is no longer organized around a central conflict, but around a mobile network of micro-conflicts and evanescent contradictions, proliferating, impossible to locate.”[xx] Hardt and Negri thus only take up Marx’s ambitions by denaturing them, their redefinition of the concept of social class having the particular advantage of letting us scrap that of class struggle.

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Notes

[i] From this one can deduce that “every body is already a multitude” (sic). Negri also says that “the multitude’s flesh wants to transform itself into the body of the general intellect,” in Multitudes, June 2002.

[ii] Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze. An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 110.

[iii] Didier Muguet, in EcoRev: Revue critique d’écologie politique, Spring 2005. The author concludes that “Hardt and Negri’s analysis can only lead to catastrophic political results.”

[iv] Daniel Bensaïd, Un monde à changer (Paris: Textuel, 2003), 68-89; and Éloge de la politique profane, op. cit., 279.

[v] Cf. Céline Spector, “Le spinozisme politique aujourd’hui : Toni Negri, Étienne Balibar . . .,” in Esprit, May 2007, 27-45. Cf. also André Tosel, “Des usages ‘marxistes’ de Spinoza. Leçons de méthode,” in Olivier Bloch (ed.), Spinoza au XXe siècle (Paris: PUF, 1993), 515-525.

[vi] Céline Spector, “La multitude ou le peuple ?”, op. cit., 31.

[vii] Cf. Carl Schmitt, Le Léviathan dans la doctrine de l’État de Thomas Hobbes, translated by Denis Trierweiler (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 117-118. Cf. also Manfred Walther, “Carl Schmitt et Baruch Spinoza ou les aventures du concept du politique,” in Olivier Bloch (ed.), Spinoza au XXe siecle, op. cit., 361-374.

[viii] Céline Spector, “Le spinozisme politique aujourd’hui,” op. cit., 38. Cf. also François Zourabichvili, Le Conservatisme paradoxal de Spinoza (Paris: PUF, 2002).

[ix] Cf. David Sherman, “The Ontological Need: Positing Subjectivity and Resistance in Hardt and Negri’s Empire,” op. cit. Cf. also Sergio Bologna, “Proletari e Stato di Antonio Negri,” in Primo Maggio, quoted by Steven Wright in Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism “ (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 170.

[x] Pierre Dardot, “A propos de la multitude,” op. cit., 144.

[xi] Céline Spector, “La multitude ou le peuple ?”, op. cit., 886.

[xii] Toni Negri, “Pour une définition ontologique de la multitude,” op. cit.

[xiii] Thomas Hobbes, De Cive [1642], XII, 8.

[xiv] We note that Hardt and Negri do not manage to conceive of sovereignty except on the model of Jean Bodin, who defines it as indivisible. The concept of divided sovereignty completely escapes them.

[xv] Antonio Negri is hee abandoning the dialectic he still defended a few years ago. Another great merit of Spinoza is supposedly to have escaped any consideration of a dialectical character: if God is confounded with the world’s substance, there is no reason to make humanity’s final redemption depend on any “reconciliation” with an alienated nature.

[xvi] Antonio Negri, interview in Philosophie Magazine, op. cit., 59.

[xvii] Toni Negri, “Pour une définition ontologique de la multitude,” op. cit.

[xviii] Pierre Dardot, “A propos de la multitude,” op. cit., 144-145.

[xix] The same idea is supported by Alexander Bard and Jan Soderqvist (Netocracy: The New Power Elite and Life After Capitalism [London: Reuters, 2002]).

[xx] Céline Spector, “La multitude ou le peuple ?”, op. cit., 884.