multitude @ www.raymondvandewiel.nl

A paper from 2004 dealing with the first part Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's concept of the multitude. For another, more recent, paper on this concept click here (PDF).

The Multitude Deconstructed

In 1972 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari formulated the amorphous contours of their new nomadic subjectivity. In 1980 they elaborated this concept, which by then was labelled rhizomatic, although it remained, due to their convoluted prose, an equivocal concept, and, despite their ambitions, also largely academic. In the last decade, however, we have we seen several empirical embodiments of their theoretical notions. The rhizomatic or non-hierarchical network has in fact become almost synonymous to contemporary forms of organization—be it sociological, economic, political or cognitive.

One of the more influential studies into these 'postmodern' configurations is Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire, which, contrary to common practice, acknowledges its indebtedness to Deleuze and Guattari. This study analyses the formation of a new global geopolitical order, an apparently chaotic set of controls and representative organisations which, on closer inspection, forms a pyramidal power-structure that is composed of three progressively broader tiers—a replica of Polybius' description of Roman government, hence the denomination 'Empire'. At its narrow monarchic pinnacle we find the only remaining superpower, the United States, followed closely by a handful of other nation-states—roughly, those represented in the G8, which together control the primary global monetary instruments—and a handful of supranational institutions such as the WTO, NATO, and the IMF. In the second, aristocratic, tier reside transnational capitalist corporations and the general set of sovereign nation-states. The base of the pyramid is formed by the democratic-representational comitia—the United Nations General Assembly, religious organisations, the media, and NGOs, which together are supposed to represent the People in the global constitution. It is in this tier that, albeit indirectly, the multitude appears as the Other of the People: “The democratic forces that in this framework ought to constitute the active and open element of the imperial machine appear rather as corporative forces, as a set of superstitions and fundamentalisms, betraying a spirit that is conservative when not downright reactionary. […] This limited sphere of imperial 'democracy' is configured as a People (an organized particularity that defends established privileges and properties) rather than as a multitude (the universality of free and productive practices).” (316) It is the role of Empire to mould the multitude, via mechanisms of representation, into a People, to transcendentally confiscate the ostensibly chaotic and thus 'dangerous' immanent force of the multitude and reconfigure (or reterritorialize) its multiplicity into one will. Empire, Hardt and Negri write, is an apparatus of capture that lives of the vitality of the multitude.

It is in this complex dialectic between Empire and its antithesis that the multitude is actualised:

New figures of struggle and new subjectivities are produced in the conjecture of events, in the universal nomadism […] They are not posed merely against the imperial system—they are not simply negative forces. They also express, nourish, and develop positively their own constituent projects. […] This constituent aspect of the movement of the multitude, in its myriad faces, is really the positive terrain of the historical construction of Empire, […] an antagonistic and creative positivity. The deterritorializing power of the multitude is the productive force that sustains Empire and at the same time the force that calls for and makes necessary its destruction. (p. 61)

The multitude, thus, plays a prominent part in Empire, and not in the least for its revolutionary potential to establish what Spinoza called an absolute democracy, to subvert the alleged post-disciplinary societies of control and its concomitant biopower, in short to attack post-industrial capitalist hegemony with effective weaponry.

Hardt and Negri conclude their analysis with a chapter that focuses directly on the multitude and end with an optimistic outlook:

Certainly, there must be a moment when reappropriation [of wealth from capital] and self-organization [of the multitude] reach a threshold and configure a real event. This is when the political is really affirmed—when the genesis is complete and self-valorization, the cooperative convergence of subjects, and the proletarian management of production become a constituent power. […] We do not have any models to offer for this event. Only the multitude through its practical experimentation will offer the models and determine when and how the possible becomes real. (411)

Empirical reality seemed to substantiate this intuition in the rapid growth of the anti-globalisation movement which showed its teeth in the large protests in Seattle in 1999 and Genoa in 2001. The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 seem, however, to have worked as a pivotal point with respect to this development—offering, one might cynically conclude, the dwindling Empire, in a Hobbesian fashion, the chance to defend itself against the multitude through the production of fear. This too is a realisation of a lemma from Empire: “The first moment of Hobbes's logic is the assumption of civil war as the originary state of human society, a generalized conflict among individual actors. In a second moment, then, in order to guarantee survival against the mortal dangers of war, humans must agree to a pact that assigns to a leader the absolute right to act.” (pp. 83-4)

These two 'real events' have become the central themes of the second book that Hardt and Negri's co-operation has produced: Multitude, War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. This book, which appeared late in 2004, is not so much a sequel as it is a reiteration from a new point of view in a new, accessible style, rid of the poststructuralist jargon that permeated the previous book. Multitude remains, the authors insist, despite its ubiquitous subject matter and its almost casual tone, a book of philosophy which aims to shape a conceptual ground for a political process of democratisation rather than present an answer to the question 'what to do?' or offer a programme for concrete action. Saying this, however, does not dismiss the obligation of their conceptualisations to be both philosophically consistent and empirically relevant. In the interplay between theory and practice an understanding of reality, albeit ephemeral and partial, can be approximated. It is thus against both horizons that this book should be held accountable.

There is a subtle shift between Empire and Multitude. Whereas in the former the multitude is presented not so much as the antithesis to empire but rather as its supposed synthesis, in the latter the opposition takes the form of a dialectic. The global desire for democracy that the authors perceive in for instance the anti-globalisation movement is the actualisation of the multitude and the global war against terror is the actualisation of empire. The renewed focus on the concept of just war had briefly been touched upon in Empire as one of the symptoms this new organizing principle. In Multitude this symptom reappears as one of the prime impediments for the realization of democracy and freedom. To be able to overcome this obstacle, Negri and Hardt write, and thus to be able to pick up the thread where Empire has left of, one must first analyse the present configuration of war and its contradictions. This analysis is performed in the first chapter, after which chapters two and three focus on multitude and democracy respectively.

War, Hardt and Negri contend, is going through a watershed transformation. While during modernity war was alleged to be a state of exception and peace the rule, the difference between war and peace is in the present, postmodern, era increasingly obscured as a result of a generalized state of exception—a mixture between Giorgio Agamben's meaning of the concept, a prolonged suspension of civil rights and common law practice on the basis of an alleged state of emergency, and America's exceptionalism as the only remaining super-power, thus ostensibly forced into a transcendental position in relation to the law in order to enforce this law upon countries which it considers rogue states. We can see this generalized state of exception actualised in for instance the USA patriot act, the British Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act, Guantanamo Bay and the new US National Security Strategy (NSS), which stretches the concept of preemption in such a way that it becomes synonymous to prevention.1 The NSS sharply brings into focus the ethical and ideological aspects of the Medieval concept of 'just war' when it says that its aim is “to help make the world not just safer but better”. Thus it not only aims to pursue national interests, which are in neorealist international relations theory generally considered to be 'amoral', but also to spread Western-liberal values such as freedom, democracy, free enterprise, and the right to own property because they are considered to be universal.2 This is consistent with what Negri and Hardt call the new type of war, which, they claim, differs not in degree but in kind from the modern concept of war in which, they say, justice has no place. While the NSS sees the joint struggle of the war on terror as the “best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the seventeenth century to build a world where great powers compete in peace instead of continually prepare for war”, Negri and Hardt think that, on the contrary, the new type of war is both spatially and temporally infinite because, rather than to create peace, its aim is to create and perpetuate a new social order, not by domination, but by production and reproduction of all aspects of social life. War, the authors write, emerges as the most important principle of organization for society, in other words it has become a regime of biopower. The creative aspect of war, evident in such notions as 'nation building' has become more important than its destructive force.

One could question their thesis on the basis of its slim empirical ground, but—they would contravene—as we are witnessing the beginning of the new type of war, the aforementioned examples are only the vanguard of practices that would further underpin their theory. More problematic, however, both theoretically and empirically, is the fissure they situate between modern warfare and their new type of war. They even pinpoint the exact starting point of the new type of war: May 26th, 1972—the day the US and Soviet Union signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. On this day, write Negri and Hardt, “war began to become an integral element of biopower, aimed at the construction and reproduction of the global social order.” (39) The modern concept of war, on the contrary, is described as purely destructive: “generalized war involving unrestrained, high-intensity conflict and destruction.” (38). This schematism is easily refutable. War has always had a productive element. The final unification of Germany as a result of the French-German War and the stratification of the American society by McCarthyism during the cold war are just two of many examples.

Another rebuttal of their sharp divide between modern and Empirical warfare can be based on the authors' assertion that in the former era war was an exception, while in the present era it is a permanent condition. Historically modernity is a tumultuous era with only two relatively short periods of relaxation on the European continent and almost ceaseless hostilities in the outer territories.3 The distinction is, however, intended abstractly. It is meant to point out that the modern concept of sovereignty exiled war to the specific terrain of conflicts between sovereign authorities. Domestic conflicts were to be peacefully resolved through political interaction. For several reasons this is a weak argument. First, this reduces the argument to semantics: whether or not politics did in actuality exile domestic violence becomes irrelevant—domestic conflict is not war, but civil war, and that, ostensibly, did not count as a real war. Hardt and Negri nevertheless argue that in the postmodern era war can no longer be seen as an exception “given the emergence of innumerable global civil wars.” (5) In the era of Empire, thus, it seems civil wars and domestic uprisings suddenly do count as real wars. Secondly the argument is to some extent circular: the divide between war as an exception and war as a rule is a truism only if one accepts that indeed there is a new era in which sovereignty is deteriorating—a hypothesis which is supported by the existence of a fissure between modern and postmodern warfare but seriously weakened by an absence of a sharp divide. Finally, we are presented with another semantic issue in this connection. War and politics, according to Hardt and Negri, refer, in the modern era, to altogether different domains: the first to international conflicts, the second to domestic ones. Nevertheless they contend, with reference to Carl von Clausewitz and Carl Schmitt, that the term politics, in the same era, specifically referred to relations between sovereign entities. This obviously undermines their earlier arrangement. Then they claim that presently war and politics are increasingly encroaching upon each other. On the one hand the League of Nations, the United Nations and international law and conventions seek, they claim, increasingly to extend the influence of politics to international relations. On the other hand, in the present era, war tends to extend its influence to the national terrain by focussing on national and international 'security' and thus by collapsing the difference between warfare and policing. Obviously, when we consider police action and domestic intelligence gathering as “low intensity warfare” and international conflicts as “high intensity policing”, we have woven a patchwork of a permanent 'politics of war'. Question remains, however, whether this blurring of boundaries is not partly or wholly caused by their own terminological and semantic classifications. And even if it wouldn't be, we could seriously question the divide because international law, which supports the conjunction of politics and war, is—and the authors themselves underline this—a phenomenon which is firmly rooted in modernity, and thus the dynamic between war and politics was never a purely postmodern constellation.

The taxonomy that lies at the basis of the analysis of the new form of war is, to say the least, both philosophically and historically flimsy, which is not say that warfare is not changing. When Al-Qaeda issued its attacks on New York and Washington, the US response seemed incommensurate to the organizations polycentric command structure and horizontal communications network. It focussed vigorously on the organizations figurehead, bin Laden (a focus which, at least publicly, has disappeared as soon as he proved to be as elusive as 'his' network), and aimed not at the network itself but at a sovereign state (Afghanistan). Of course bin Laden had close relations with the Taliban regime, but before his stay in Afghanistan, bin Laden had been weaving his web in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Sudan, at the time in good harmony with the authorities of these countries. The attack of Afghanistan could thus been interpreted as a reaction to the popular demand for a forceful response and the result of the deliberate 'construction' of bin Laden as culprit, rather than an effective attack in what by then was called the 'war on terror'. But we have come a long way since these days, only a few years back, and the military activity that remains in Afghanistan has been organized in a way that seems more effective to counter a network: in small, semi-autonomously operating, highly classified command units rather than massive military operations.

This transformation in military organisation and strategy is, Negri and Hardt imply, a radical postmodern turn: the new soldier becomes a 'valuable commodity', parallel to the knowledge worker in the post-industrial economy, and military forces aim for a 'full spectrum dominance', combining military force with social, economical, political, psychological and ideological control, which is roughly similar to the concept of biopower. Empirically, however, the opposite has surfaced. American ground-troops in the Iraq-war are underpaid, undereducated, and poorly informed and equipped. It seems only for reasons of public support that casualties among American troops should be restricted. Also, if the goal of the US army in Iraq was full spectrum dominance they have done a bad job. As much as a doctrinal change based on technological possibilities, it seems the new military tactics are a pragmatic reaction towards the changes in what Negri and Hardt call 'resistance'. Indeed, they write “resistance is primary with respect to power” (64). The whole point of their investigation into the new form of war seems to be the construction of a new reality and the subjectivities which are the authors of this new reality, “the real protagonists of history”. This role is awarded to those who 'resist' global or local forms of sovereignty, and a history of the forms of social and political resistance movements would “help us recognize what are today and will be in the future the most powerful and most desirable organizational forms of rebellion and revolution.” (63). What follows is a Whiggish historical account which divides 'freedom-movements' from terrorist and criminal networks not on the basis of legality or the use of violence, but rather on the basis of three guiding criteria (of which the desire for democracy of the resistance-movement is the most important criterion), which are supposed to transcend the current historical situation but which I would say, on the contrary, are very much products of their times. These guiding principles coalesce in the present time in which “the distributed network structure provides the model for an absolute democratic organisation that corresponds to the dominant forms of economic and social production and is also the most powerful weapon against the ruling power structure.” (p. 88). What surfaces here in the midst of their 'postmodern' turn is a return to a rather traditional model for historical progress which concurrently revives the end-of-history optimism that was rare in the political left since the heydays of Marxism.4 The present examples of resistance, they write, “can only allude to the form we are seeking, the strategic passage that leads the proletariat to take the form of the multitude, that is, a network body.” (p. 90). It is at this point that Negri and Hardt make the move away from war back to the multitude:

[T]he legitimisation of the global order is based fundamentally on war… [C]apitalist production and the life (and production) of the multitude are tied together increasingly intimately and are mutually determining… [W]hen Empire calls on war for its legitimation, the multitude calls on democracy as its political foundation. This democracy that opposes war is an 'absolute democracy.' We can also call this democratic movement a process of “exodus,” insofar as it involves the multitude breaking the ties that link imperial sovereign authority to the consent of the subordinated. (pp. 90-1)

But how realistic is the realisation of this idealism in the light of recent developments such as the 'war against terror' and growing fundamentalist factions within virtually all world-religions? Are those developments just the last convulsions of an Empire gone sour and can thus serve as catalysts for the leap towards the rule of the multitude? Despite the fact that Multitude's first part seems to address these contemporary questions, in actuality it does not seriously consider them. The part about 'war' remains relatively independent from the second and third parts of the book and has not led to a serious reconsideration of the theory of the multitude as put forward in Empire. Nor has the conceptual criticism that their specific take on the multitude has attracted led to any serious reorientation of the concept, or even a critical response, except for a short and cursory paragraph which claims to give an overview of possible points of critique only to disqualify them one after the other. After the notes from the front line in the first part, theoretically and empirically feeble as they might be, the return to the scholarly conceptualisation of the multitude, especially in the somewhat autistic way it is treated by Negri and Hardt—lacking the lure of a philosophical debate at its cutting edge and the surprise-effect of an original empirical orientation—brings us to an altogether different register of thought. From a comprehensive historical account painted in bold strokes, we turn to an in-depth analysis of contemporary forms of production (and labour) as a result of the fact that the multitude is almost exclusively construed in social-economic terms—a reaction to the alleged negligence of “class” in recent years. “The concept of the multitude,” Negri and Hardt write, “is meant to revive Marx' political project of class-struggle.” (117) Nevertheless they argue that the multitude “strongly differs” from the proletariat, “at least from the understanding it gained in the nineteenth and twentieth-century.” (118). Marx' methodology, they write, needs to be refitted to the present social reality because of his notion of the “historical tendency” which implicitly denotes the idea of historical periodization. At this point they rehash their version of Foucault's epistemic division which Negri has invoked in several of his earlier writings, such as in the following quote from 1992:

According to Foucault and Deleuze, around this final paradigm [control/communication] there is determined a qualitative leap which allows thinking a new, radically new, order of possibility: communism. If in the society of sovereignty democracy is republican, if in the disciplinary society democracy is socialist, then in the society of communication democracy cannot but be communist. Historically, the passage which determined between disciplinary society and the society of communication is the final possible dialectical passage. Afterwards, the ontological constitution cannot but be the product of the multitude of free individuals…5

The invocation of Foucault and Deleuze is, however, of little substance. Foucault located historical fissures at the early 17th century and the beginning of the 19th century—incongruent with any periodization Negri advances. Also, Foucault has commented on his own conceptualisation that these were not meant as historical divisions but rather as geographical genealogies, explicitly localizable in Europe, which is hardly congruent with the universal and strictly temporal role it is given by Negri. Finally, the last fault line, roughly at the beginning of the 20th century, remained implicit in Foucault; it is Deleuze who has taken up the Foucauldian allusions on this potential discontinuity and moulded the 'society of control' (which Negri renames society of communication).6 But Deleuze also differs from Negri's interpretation. When Negri, in an interview, sketches the scenario that in this final paradigm “every person, every minority, every singularity is potentially capable of recovering speech and thereby a greater degree of freedom” and that possibly “the Marxist utopia [of a] transversal organization of free individuals [is] less utopian than before”, Deleuze responds that speech is “totally permeated by money: not by accident, but by nature”, and that freedom will thus not be gained through communication but rather by “creating vacuoles of non-communication, circumventors, to escape control.”7 He is also skeptical of the notion, central to Multitude, that the new paradigm might create forms of resistance that would lead towards the form of 'autonomous' communism that Negri sees as imminent. Deleuze is sympathetic towards the notion of a new kind of 'spontaneous' event that Negri and Hardt, as we have seen above, see as the inevitable outcome of Empire, but certainly does not believe in Spinozian 'absolutism' or ontological closure: “What matters in such processes is the extent to which, when they take shape, they escape both constituted forms of knowledge and dominant forms of power. Even if they in their turn engender new forms of power or are incorporated into new forms of knowledge.”8

What seems to underlie this disagreement is Negri's invocation of Habermas' theory of communicative action, which returns in Multitude with the endorsement of the 'post-systems theory', in Negri and Hardt's words a “molecular conception of the law and the production of norms (…) based on a constant, free and open interaction between singularities which produces common norms as a result of communication.” (214) What is interesting is that this notion, they say, is better understood in the context of an ethics of performativity. Here Negri and Hardt seem to be sensitive tot the recent cautious approach of Habermassian thinkers and Derridean inspired theorists, an advancement which was inconceivable at the time of the aforementioned interview.

For several reasons it is pertinent to shortly digress at this point and focus on Derrida's writing on justice and the law, notably in “Force of Law” from 1989.9 Not only does Derrida in this text strongly engage in the opening up of concepts such as 'law' and 'justice', which Negri and Hardt seem to encourage, but he also deals with themes such as violence, war and policing, revolution, performativity and democracy. Derrida presents a deconstructive reading of Walter Benjamin's essay Zur Kritik der Gewalt, published in 1921 and thus reverberating the German post-World War I turmoil of 1918-1919....

1. The US PATRIOT Act of 2002 is a law which significantly increases the surveillance and investigative powers of US law enforcement agencies but lacks the typical system of checks and balances that traditionally safeguards civil liberties in the face of such legislation. (see: http://www.epic.org/privacy/terrorism/usapatriot). The British Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act enables indefinite detention without a trial of foreign nationals suspected of involvement in international terrorism. Guantanamo Bay refers to the long-term imprisonment of so-called 'illegal combatants' which is presumably itself illegal under the Third Geneva Convention. On the concept of US exceptionalism Negri and Hardt quote former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, which only goes to show that we are dealing here with a phenomenon which, as Noam Chomsky comments, is not merely a strategy of the present US government but has "many precursors, both in US history and among... [back]

2. cf. http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss/2006/nss2006.pdf.html [back]

3. If we consider the modern era to start after the cessation of the religious wars with the peace of Westphalia in 1648 we can only see short periods of relative peace. The Spanish Succession Wars (1701-13) are sometimes epitomized as the first world-war of the modern era. After the peace of Utrecht there are several minor skirmishes leading up to the short-lived peace of Aachen, after which the Seven Years' War (1755-63) spread out from North-America to the East and West Indies and Africa. After its official end, hostilities remained, leading eventually to the American Revolution. On the European continent, meanwhile, Prussia and Austria collide over control of central Europe. The French revolution forms the overture of the coalition-wars (roughly from 1792 until 1809) and Napoleons field-campaigns, changing the face of Europe, ending in the Freedom Wars from 1813-15. An era of revolutions and uprisings followed, culminating in 1848. The Seven Week's War in 1866 and the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) conclude the unification of Germany. The Colonial hostilities in the East and Africa, meanwhile, are settled, establishing the control of Europe over large parts of the world. Europe's grip on Latin America diminishes, while the influence of the United States, which, after its Civil War, became an important power in the region, grows. Turmoil breaks out in the Balkan, leading eventually to the First World War, which, in its turn, leads to the Second World War. [back]

4. "If in the society of sovereign democracy is republican, if in the disciplinary society democracy is socialist, then in the society of communication democracy cannot but be communist. Historically, the passage which is determined between disciplinary society and the society of communication is the final possible dialectical passage. Afterwards, the ontological constitution cannot but be the product of the multitude of free individuals." (Negri quoted in Nicholas Thoburn, "Autonomous Production? On Negri's 'New Synthesis'", Theory, Culture & Society, 2001 (SAGE, London), vol. 18(5), p. 89. [back]

5. Quoted in: Nicholas Thoburn, 'Autonomous Production? On Negri's "New Synthesis"', in: Theory, Culture & Society, 2001 (SAGE, London), vol. 18(5): p. 89. [back]

6. Cf. Dieter Lesage "Zijn en Verzet", De Witte Raaf 97, may-juni 2002. [back]

7. Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers, 1972-1990 (Paris: Minuit, 1990), pp. 236-8. See also: Thoburn, op cit., p. 89. [back]

8. Ibid., p. 238, my italics. [back]

9. "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority.'", David Gray Carlson, Drucilla Cornell, and Michel Rosenfeld, eds. Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, 1992 (Routledge, New York and London), pp. 3-67. [back]