Colleagues and I just completed reading Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. We had all been seeing scads of references to this book and were quite keen on reading it. However, we were all rather underwhelmed by Hardt & Negri’s account of the emergent possibilities for global democracy.
To briefly summarize, Hardt & Negri’s book is an attempt to locate a political subject that can resist the logic of Empire—i.e., the exercise of power by nation-states, international institutions, and capital to maintain the global, neoliberal order. This new political subject is the titular multitude, the global masses transformed by their engagement in the newly hegemonic paradigm of immaterial labour. Immaterial labour refers to those types of labour that produce or process ideas, symbols, relationships, and affects. (Hardt & Negri do concede that the distinction between material and immaterial labour is an analytical one; in practice, they are “almost always” mixed together [p. 109].) Because immaterial labour is biopolitical—i.e., it creates forms of life as its product or byproduct—and because the expropriation of the common that it thus produces is the source of a common antagonism, the multitude has within it the means of self-rule.
However, the book’s project fails in at least three ways.
First, the multitude does not fulfull the quest for a post-liberal and post-socialist political subject. Hardt & Negri define the multitude as “an open network of singularities that links together on the basis of the common they share and the common they produce” (p. 129). The multitude is not a collectivity in the old sense (either of the body politic or of the socialist party/state) because participating in the common life of the multitude does not require the subsumption of the singularity:
The contradictory conceptual couple, identity and difference, is not the adequate framework for understanding the organization of the multitude. Instead 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. (P. 127)
For all its fashionable network-society vocabulary, this strikes me as little more than a recreation of the liberal individual in the state of nature entering into a social contract for the mutual benefit of all. Furthermore, because the multitude is based on one’s dependence on and contribution to the common, it is potentially inclusive of all of humanity; Hardt & Negri do not address the problem that the multitude also includes those people who, as individuals, benefit the most from the expropriation of the collective, biopolitical production that is embodied in the common.
Second, their inscription of democracy (defined as “the rule of all by all”) as the telos of all movements for social change is problematic. I am not sure it is good historiography to read the achievement of this vision of democracy into previous (and therefore “incomplete”) movements. It strikes me that what has been desired is not so much the rule of all by all as the end of (illegitimate) rule by another. Moreover, the emphasis on democracy seems to confuse means with ends. Democracy may well be necessary for a just global social order but it is by no means sufficient for one, as there are no guarantees on what that the multitude will democratically choose to do. (This second problem is, of course, exacerbated by the aforementioned conflict within the multitude that is elided from Hardt & Negri’s account.)
Third, for all of the emphasis on the importance of communication to the creation of the multitude, Hardt & Negri do not articulate a theory of communication. At times, communication seems to be nothing more than the regular interchange of messages as part of the circuits of production. At others, the authors seem to have a “sacramental” conception of communication, for lack of a better term, in mind: “The common does not refer to traditional notions of either the community or the public; it is based on the communication among singularities and emerges through the collaborative social processes of production” (p. 204). Without more clarity on this point, the description of the multitude’s “becoming” through processes of collaboration and communication is unconvincing.
These three problems are mutually re-enforcing and reproductive of one another. My suspicion is that they require a similarly mutual solution: a triune theory that unites a philosophical anthropology to address the nature of the human being, an ethics to evaluate values to correct for the focus on democracy, and a theory of communication. To say that this theory must be “triune” is to seek, for each term, a theory that contains the other two—for example, a conception of the human subject (anthropology) that implies how subjects ought to treat to one another (ethics) and how they can relate to one another (communication).
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